The colonization of Ireland by mammals, has been the subject of extensive study using genetic methods, and forms a central problem in understanding the phylo-geography of European mammals after the Last Glacial Maximum. Ireland exhibits a de-pauperate mammal fauna relative to Great Britain and continental Europe, and a range of natural and anthropogenic processes have given rise to its modern fauna. Previous Europe-wide surveys of the European badger (Meles meles) have found conflicting microsatellite and...

1. The mutation accumulation theory of senescence predicts that age-related deterioration of fitness can be exaggerated when inbreeding causes homozygosity for deleterious alleles. A vital component of fitness, in natural populations, is the incidence and progression of disease. 2. Evidence is growing for natural links between inbreeding and ageing; between inbreeding and disease; between sex and ageing; and between sex and disease. However, there is scant evidence, to date, for links among age, disease, inbreeding...

A honey bee queen mates on wing with an average of 12 males and stores their sperm to produce progeny of mixed paternity. The degree of a queen’s polyandry is positively associated with measures of her colony’s fitness, and observed distributions of mating number are evolutionary optima balancing risks of mating flights against benefits to the colony. Effective mating numbers as high as 40 have been documented, begging the question of the upper bounds of...

Swine influenza presents a substantial disease burden for pig populations worldwide and poses a potential pandemic threat to humans. There is considerable diversity in both H1 and H3 influenza viruses circulating in swine due to the frequent introductions of viruses from humans and birds coupled with geographic segregation of global swine populations. Much of this diversity is characterized genetically but the antigenic diversity of these viruses is poorly understood. Critically, the antigenic diversity shapes the...

Prioritising the management of invasive alien species (IAS) is of global importance and within Europe integral to the EU IAS regulation. To prioritise management effectively the risks posed by IAS need to be assessed, but so too does the feasibility of their management. While risk of IAS to the EU has been assessed, the feasibility of management has not. We assessed the feasibility of eradicating 60 new (not yet established) and 35 emerging (established with...

More than 50 million cattle are likely exposed to bovine tuberculosis (bTB) worldwide, highlighting a need for vaccination in regions where bTB is endemic and test-and-slaughter approaches are unfeasible. Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) was first evaluated as a vaccine in cattle even before its widespread use in humans, yet its efficacy in cattle remains poorly understood. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of BCG against bTB challenge in cattle, which demonstrated a...

Population structure is critical to infectious disease transmission. As a result, theoretical and empirical contact networks models of infectious disease spread are increasingly providing valuable insights into wildlife epidemiology. Analysing an exceptionally detailed data set on contact structure within a high-density population of European badgers Meles meles, we show that a modular contact network produced by spatially structured stable social groups, lead to smaller epidemics, particularly for infections with intermediate transmissibility. The key advance is...

Movement of individuals, or their genes, can influence eco-evolutionary processes in structured populations. We have limited understanding of the extent to which spatial behaviour varies among groups and individuals within populations. Here we use genetic pedigree reconstruction in a long-term study of European badgers (Meles meles) to characterise the extent of extra-group paternity, occurring as a consequence of breeding excursions, and to test hypothesised drivers of variation at multiple levels. We jointly estimate parentage and...

Understanding of the movements of species at multiple scales is essential to appreciate patterns of population connectivity and in some cases, the potential for pathogen transmission. The serotine bat (Eptesicus serotinus) is a common and widely distributed species in Europe where it frequently harbours European bat lyssavirus type 1 (EBLV-1), a virus causing rabies and transmissible to humans. In the United Kingdom, it is rare, with a distribution restricted to south of the country and...

Native to China and Mongolia, the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) now enjoys a worldwide distribution. While black rats and the house mouse tracked the regional development of human agricultural settlements, brown rats did not appear in Europe until the 1500s, suggesting their range expansion was a response to relatively recent increases in global trade. We inferred the global phylogeography of brown rats using 32 k SNPs, and detected 13 evolutionary clusters within five expansion routes....

Trading animals between farms and via markets can provide a conduit for spread of infections. By studying trading networks we might better understand the dynamics of livestock diseases. We constructed ingoing contact chains of cattle farms in Great Britain that were linked by trading, to elucidate potential pathways for the transmission of infection, and to evaluate their effect on the risk of a farm experiencing a bovine tuberculosis (bTB) incident. Our findings are consistent with...

Senescence has been hypothesised to arise in part from age-related declines in immune performance, but the patterns and drivers of within-individual age-related changes in immunity remain virtually unexplored in natural populations. Here, using a long-term epidemiological study of wild European badgers (Meles meles), we (i) present evidence of a within-individual age-related decline in the response of a key immune-signalling cytokine, Interferon-gamma (IFNγ), to ex vivo lymphocyte stimulation, and (ii) investigate three putative drivers of individual...

Contact networks are fundamental to the transmission of infection and host sex often affects the acquisition and progression of infection. However, the epidemiological impacts of sex-related variation in animal contact networks have rarely been investigated. We test the hypothesis that sex-biases in infection are related to variation in multilayer contact networks structured by sex in a population of European badgers Meles meles naturally infected with Mycobacterium bovis. Our key results are that male-male and between-sex...

In 2010 the BadgerBCG vaccine was licensed for use in badgers in the UK to reduce the severity of Mycobacterium bovis infection, and hence the risks of onward transmission to cattle. To date badger vaccination in the UK has been deployed at a relatively limited spatial scale (compared to the large scale badger culls) and almost exclusively in high density badger populations which have not been recently culled. UK Government policy direction has moved towards...

1. Preventing the arrival of invasive alien species (IAS) is a major priority in managing biological invasions. However, information on introduction pathways is currently scattered across many databases that often use different categorisations to describe similar pathways. This hampers the identification and prioritisation of pathways in order to meet the main targets of recent environmental policies. 2. Therefore, we integrate pathway information from two major IAS databases, IUCN's Global Invasive Species Database (GISD) and the...

Bacterial plasmids are important carriers of virulence and antibiotic resistance genes. Nevertheless, little is known of the determinants of plasmid distribution in bacterial populations. Here the factors affecting the diversity and distribution of the large plasmids of Escherichia coli were explored in cattle grazing on semi-natural grassland, a set of populations with low frequencies of antibiotic resistance genes. Critically, the population genetic structure of bacterial hosts was chararacterized. This revealed structured E. coli populations with...

Species of conservation concern, or those in conflict with man, are most efficiently managed with an understanding of their population dynamics. European bats exemplify the need for successful and cost-effective management for both reasons, often simultaneously. Across Europe, bats are protected, and the concept of Favourable Conservation Status (FCS) is used as a key tool for the assessment and licensing of disruptive actions to populations. However, for efficient decision-making, this assessment requires knowledge on the...

Bats, including African straw-coloured fruit bats (Eidolon helvum), have been highlighted as reservoirs of many recently emerged zoonotic viruses. This common, widespread and ecologically important species was the focus of longitudinal and continent-wide studies of the epidemiological and ecology of Lagos bat virus, henipaviruses and Achimota viruses. Here we present a spatial, morphological, demographic, genetic and serological dataset encompassing 2827 bats from nine countries over an 8-year period. Genetic data comprises cytochrome b mitochondrial sequences...

It is natural to regard most animal movement as a continuous-time process, generally observed at discrete times. Most existing statistical methods for movement data ignore this; the remainder mostly use discrete-time approximations, the statistical properties of which have not been widely studied, or are limited to special cases. We aim to facilitate wider use of continuous-time modelling for realistic problems. We develop novel methodology which allows exact Bayesian statistical analysis for a rich class of...

Social interactions among hosts influence the persistence and spread of infectious pathogens. Daily and seasonal variation in the frequency and type of social interactions will play an important role in disease epidemiology and, alongside other factors, may have an influence on wider disease dynamics by causing seasonal forcing of infection, especially if the seasonal variation experienced by a population is considerable. We explored temporal variation in within-group contacts in a high-density population of European badgers...

The first dataset is comprised of anonymised badger trapping records for government and lay vaccinator groups in England. This dataset only includes records from groups operating under Natural England licence. In the first dataset, each record gives details of the number of traps set by a given group at a particular location (an active badger sett or other area of badger activity) on a single trapping night. An anonymised code has been given to each...

The aim of this study was to design and test a novel bait hopper equipped with a PIT-tag reader and bait weighing device, to record bait uptake by individual grey squirrels for optimising the delivery of a contraceptive bait. The hopper was tested in a laboratory, in a trial using captive grey squirrels and then used to collect data on the feeding behaviour of free-living grey squirrels in two woods.

The current extinction and climate change crises pressure us to predict population dynamics with ever-greater accuracy. Although predictions rest on the well-advanced theory of age-structured populations, two key issues remain poorly-explored. Specifically, how the age-dependency in demographic rates and the year-to-year interactions between survival and fecundity affect stochastic population growth rates. We use inference, simulations, and mathematical derivations to explore how environmental perturbations determine population growth rates for populations with different age-specific demographic rates and...

Carnivores tend to exhibit a lack of (or less pronounced) genetic structure at continental scales in both a geographic and temporal sense using various mitochondrial DNA markers on modern and/or ancient specimens. This tends to confound the identification of refugial areas and post-glacial colonization patterns in this group. In this study we used Genotyping-by-Sequencing (GBS) to reconstruct the phylogeographic history of a widespread carnivore, the red fox (Vulpes vulpes), in Europe by investigating broad-scale patterns...