Social spiders are thought to predominantly receive information about their environment through vibrational cues. Thus, group living introduces the challenge of distinguishing useful vibrational information from the background noise of nestmates. Here we investigate whether spatial proximity between colony-mates may allow social spiders () to reduce background noise that might obstruct vibrational information from prey. To do so, we constructed experimental colonies and measured whether the number of spiders in proximity to one another whilst resting could predict the number of spiders that participated in prey capture. Additionally, we exposed spider colonies to five different simulated vibrational cues mimicking prey to determine which cue types spiders were most responsive to. We found that the number of spiders huddled together prior to foraging trials was positively correlated with the number of spiders participating in collective foraging. Furthermore, colonies responded more quickly to pulsed vibrational cues over other types of vibrational patterns. Together these data reveal that both social interactions and prey cues shape how social sit-and-wait predators experience and respond to their environment.

Competition experiments estimating the relative effects of inter- and intraspecific competition can help to resolve whether interspecific competition results in coexistence or exclusion. For mosquitoes, most such experiments have focused on invasive and its interactions with resident . A meta-analysis of such experiments tested whether the effect of interspecific competition is greater than, less than, or equal to that of intraspecific competition, and whether competitive outcomes are dependent on food quality. For and , there was significant context dependence, with interspecific competitive advantage for with low food quality, and competitive equivalence with high food quality. Meta-analysis of survivorship yielded more significant effects than did estimated rate of increase. Competitive effects and competitive responses of each species yielded similar results. This meta-analysis suggests competitive exclusion of by , and is thus consistent with field sampling, qualitative reviews, and interpretations from individual publications. For and , most results indicated competitive equivalence and no context dependence, and are thus contrary to previous qualitative reviews and to interpretations from individual publications. For both pairs of species, published results suitable for meta-analysis remain scarce, and better experimental designs and improved analysis and reporting of statistical results are needed. Greater emphasis needs to be placed on estimating species' inter- and intra-specific competitive effects, rather than the more common, but theoretically less interesting, competitive responses. Experiments without low-density controls (i.e., replacement series) are inadequate for comparing competitive effects and responses.

Many mosquito-borne arboviruses have more than one competent vector. These vectors may or may not overlap in space and time, and may interact differently with vertebrate hosts. The presence of multiple vectors for a particular virus at one location over time will influence the epidemiology of the system, and could be important in the design of intervention strategies to protect particular hosts. A simulation model previously developed for West Nile and St. Louis encephalitis viruses and was expanded to consider two vector species. These vectors differed in their abundance through the year, but were otherwise similar. The model was used to examine the consequences of different combinations of abundance patterns on the transmission dynamics of the virus. The abundance pattern based on dominated the system and was a key factor in generating epidemics in the wild bird population. The presence of two vectors often resulted in multiple epidemic peaks of transmission. A species which was active in the winter could enable virus persistence until another vector became active in the spring, summer, or fall. The day the virus was introduced into the system was critical in determining how many epidemic peaks were observed and when the first peak occurred. The number of epidemic peaks influenced the overall proportion of birds infected. The implications of these results for assessing the relative importance of different vector species are discussed.

Computationally complex systems models are needed to advance research and implement policy in theoretical and applied population biology. Difference and differential equations used to build lumped dynamic models (LDMs) may have the advantage of clarity, but are limited in their inability to include fine-scale spatial information and individual-specific physical, physiological, immunological, neural and behavioral states. Current formulations of agent-based models (ABMs) are too idiosyncratic and freewheeling to provide a general, coherent framework for dynamically linking the inner and outer worlds of organisms. Here I propose principles for a general, modular, hierarchically scalable, framework for building computational population models (CPMs) designed to treat the inner world of individual agents as complex dynamical systems that take information from their spatially detailed outer worlds to drive the dynamic inner worlds of these agents, simulate their ecology and the evolutionary pathways of their progeny. All the modeling elements are in place, although improvements in software technology will be helpful; but most of all we need a cultural shift in the way population biologists communicate and share model components and the models themselves, fit, test, refute, and refine models, to make the progress needed to meet the ecosystems management challenges posed by global change biology.

Resource theory and metabolic scaling theory suggest that the dynamics of a pathogen within a host should strongly depend upon the rate of host cell metabolism. Once an infection occurs, key ecological interactions occur on or within the host organism that determine whether the pathogen dies out, persists as a chronic infection, or grows to densities that lead to host death. We hypothesize that, in general, conditions favoring rapid host growth rates should amplify the replication and proliferation of both fungal and viral pathogens. If a host population experiences an increase in mortality, to persist it must have a higher growth rate, per host, often reflecting greater resource availability per capita. We hypothesize that this could indirectly foster the pathogen, which also benefits from increased within-host resource turnover. We first bring together in a short review a number of key prior studies which illustrate resource effects on viral and fungal pathogen dynamics. We then report new results from a semi-continuous cell culture experiment with SHIV, demonstrating that higher mortality rates indeed can promote viral proliferation. We develop a simple model that illustrates dynamical consequences of these resource effects, including interesting effects such as alternative stable states and oscillatory dynamics. Our paper contributes to a growing body of literature at the interface of ecology and infectious disease epidemiology, emphasizing that host abundances alone do not drive community dynamics: the physiological state and resource content of infected hosts also strongly influence host-pathogen interactions.