Devils and Roadkill

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Following copied from the projects page:

"Roadkill as a means of spreading disease in Tasmanian Devils" (Gavin Fay) - Living in Tasmania, it is hard not to become familiar with the plight of the Tasmanian Devil, whose population is currently dwindling due to Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD), a rather nasty infectious cancer which has become prevalent through much of the state. DFTD infection relies on transmission of infected cells from contact, most likely due to biting, which these critters do a lot of during mating and around prey carcasses. A hot conservation topic right now is forestry plans to build roads opening up a wilderness area in the north of the state to ecotourism opportunities. The devil population in this area has until now remained disease free. There are concerns that the road will increase the likelihood that DFTD will spread to the diseasse-free population: Devils are scavengers and frequently feed on roadkill, the creation of a road may then provide an opportunity for increased frequency of contact between infected and disease-free devils. It might be interesting to investigate how introducing a fixed-location source of additional prey items (ie a road) to a devil population would change the contact network for Devils, and then also to what extent the increased contact frequency would have to be to facilitate transmission of DFTD from an infected devil population to a disease-free one.

• This sounds interesting, especially if you have some data on how the populations move/interact/etc? I've done some predator/prey dynamic modeling both as ODE and Cellular Automata (CA), and I'd suspect CA would be an interesting approach. We should talk! (Megan Olsen)

• • I really like this project, specially if you taeckle it from a CA approach...this is a technique I would like to understand better!! I am a biologist, and have been working with diseases spread in spatial structures (malaria), but from differential equations modelling and time series...I would really like to be part of this project if it turns out to become one! Please, let me know! (Vanessa Weinberger)

I'd be interested in supporting this group. Let me know if you scheudle a meeting. Anne Johnson

Some recent (possibly relevant) papers on DFTD

(to come)