| Abstract: |
| Recoveries of populations that have suffered severe disease-induced declines are
being observed across disparate taxa. Yet, we lack theoretical understanding of
the drivers and dynamics of recovery in host populations. Motivated by diseaseinduced
declines and nascent recoveries in amphibians, we developed a model to ask:
how does the rapid evolution of different host defense strategies affect the transient
recovery trajectories of hosts following pathogen invasion and disease-induced declines?
Our model, based on a moment closure approximation, provided key insights
into the transient effects of different defense mechanisms. Furthermore, populations
evolving tolerance recovered on average four times slower than populations evolving
resistance. This motivated the long-term study of a tolerance evolving host species.
We found that in the presence of a trade-off, where a higher tolerance comes at the
expense of a lower reproductive rate, the set of pandemic equilibria increases in richness
to contain equilibria where different tolerance classes are present, contrasting
the results obtained in the absence of such trade-off. |
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