NATURALIST SELECTIONS IS AN INTERVIEW SERIES PRODUCED BY THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF NATURALISTS GRADUATE COUNCIL. WE SHOWCASE GRADUATE STUDENT AND POSTDOC AUTHORED WORK IN THE AMERICAN NATURALIST, A PREMIER PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL FOR ECOLOGY, EVOLUTION, AND ANIMAL BEHAVIOR RESEARCH. CATCH UP ON EXCITING NEW PAPERS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED FROM THE JOURNAL, AND MEET SOME TRULY BRILLIANT EARLY CAREER NATURALISTS!

In this episode, Claire Teitelbaum chats with us about her new paper Teitelbaum et al. 2022: ‘Habitat specialization by urban wildlife reduces pathogen spread in urbanizing landscapes.’ We talk about how to dissect complex patterns in ecological models, and how different kinds of pathogens may spread in urban landscapes, and how Claire’s work can inform conversation efforts in urban spaces. Is habitat specialization always a good strategy to reduce pathogen spread? You can read Claire’s full paper here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/717655.

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Infected with curiosity about urban disease ecology? Email Claire at claire.teitelbaum@gmail.com!

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Credits

Featured Guest: Dr. Claire Teitelbaum, Quantitative Ecologist at the USGS Eastern Ecological Science Center

Host, Editor, Producer: Sarah McPeek, University of Virginia, US

Original Music: Daniel Nondorf, University of Virginia, US

Transcript:

You’re listening to Naturalist Selections, an interview series featuring graduate student and postdoc-authored work in The American Naturalist, produced by the American Society of Naturalists Graduate Council. I’m Sarah McPeek and today I’m talking with postdoc first-author Claire Teitelbaum about her new paper, ‘Habitat specialization by urban wildlife reduces pathogen spread in urbanizing landscapes.’ Claire completed this work during her PhD at the University of Georgia, US, where she was co-advised by Richard Hall and Sonia Altizer. Her graduate work focused on understanding how animal movement among urban and rural landscapes affects the transmission of pathogens. The models in this paper build off Claire’s research on white ibises, which transmit salmonella and other bacterial pathogens as they move between urban and rural habitat patches. In the paper, Claire uses a spatial model of animal movements among resource patches to explore how pathogen prevalence in a host population varies across space and time in landscapes with different proportions of urban vs. rural habitat patches. Her findings suggest that animals that specialize on one habitat type, either rural or urban, experience reduced pathogen transmission by limiting contact among urban-specialized and rural-specialized subsets of the host population. I’m excited to transmit to you all of Claire’s insight about the complex world of ecological population modeling.

Sarah

I thought it was really interesting that there seemed to be a lot of conceptual overlap between spatially or temporarily patchy environments and what you described as urban environments. So would you consider an urban environment to be a type of patchy environment, or do you think that there’s something particularly unique about urban spaces that distinguishes them from other types of patchy habitats?

Claire

Yes and yes. So I think that is like an astute observation. And it’s definitely true of this model, especially because the model is designed to be general. And I think we make a few points in the paper about how you could think about it in terms of other sorts of patchy environments that do or don’t vary temporarily. But at the same time, obviously, intuitively, urban environments are distinct from other sort of patchy environments in different ways. So I think one of those is a question of spatial scale, maybe that some people might consider an urban environment actually to be very homogeneous because maybe from one side of a city to another, you don’t get a lot of variation at small scales, but at the big city wide scale, it’s all sort of the same. Whereas that might not be true for an area of the same size right next door. With everything in ecology, there’s this question of scale. But for me, I think one of the most interesting things about urban environments is like the degree of human influence and human control for an environment that when you looked at diversity of habitat types across space, a natural versus an urban one, that what is composing those habitat types is really different in an urban environment. And I also, I say urban and natural because it’s convenient, and I think we kind of know what that means, but it’s convenient and somewhat arbitrary and definitely constructed distinction. So I don’t want to imply that people aren’t part of nature and people don’t affect nature outside of urban areas. But I think if I say urban, you more or less know what I mean? And that’s helpful.

Sarah

Yeah, I guess one thing that struck me from your description of these urban environments and the way that you envision that in your model was the consistency of the resources across time, which was something that I hadn’t really thought about. But it’s true that plants are only flowering for a certain time, but if you have a Hummingbird feeder, you can feed your hummingbirds basically all year round. So that’s a consistent resource patch across time as well as space.

Claire

Right, yeah. And that maybe is the distinction or an important distinction is like maybe urban environments vary a lot across small spatial scales, but not as much across time. And that is sort of the point that we’re making in the paper.

Sarah

Yeah. But I also know that concentrated resources can also come with cost, one of them being disease. So is that what really motivated you to think about this in your paper?

Claire

Yeah. This paper, for me, it’s exciting because it was like sort of in my dissertation. It’s sort of like this third or fourth third of a series of things, and it was putting them all together. So that is exciting. One of the papers was a somewhat simpler version of the model. I don’t know if it was simpler, but it just looked at movement and didn’t have a pathogen component. And we also looked at movement behavior in the Ibis system. So looking at how Ibis move between natural and urban sites in Florida, and this paper was trying to, like, take those that model and those observations and put them together to understand the pathogen component

Sarah

Did you know that you wanted to look at pathogens when you first started your PhD in this project? Or did that come out of observations of the movement of the Ibises in these urban versus natural landscapes?

Claire

Yeah. One of the biggest goals of the Ibis project is to sort of link urbanization and pathogen transmission. Specifically, the project is focused on Salmonella, you know, just understanding how urbanization affects health. Salmonella is interesting because it can also affect people. But I personally, yes, definitely knew I wanted to do the pathogen part. I had studied different aspects of animal movement behavior before