Abstract
In this paper we study the uniform persistence (UP) of an association of two competing host species sharing a directly transmitted macroparasite. Like predators, parasites can regulate UP while the hosts are either coexisting or in a dominance relationship without any infections, but cannot regulate UP in case the hosts are in bistability. The regulatory mechanism depends on the relationships between the parameters, such as host intrinsic growth rate, host carrying capacity, susceptibility, parasite pathogenicity and the magnitude of parasite aggregation. In the case of coexistence the parametric space for UP is more than that for global stability of the host-parasite equilibrium, but is less than that for UP in the case of dominance. In the case of dominance, the parasites can alter the competitive outcome locally or can enhance the local exclusion of the inferior competitor and thus, unlike the predation, parasitism has an beneficial effect over competition. We derive explicitly the range of the values of ratios of the rates of reproduction and survivorship of the hosts, and also of the values of the degree of aggregations, with which macroparasites are not effective in maintaining its beneficial effect over competition. Finally our results support the body-size hypothesis of Price et al. (1988), with possible explanations of certain exceptional examples of the hypothesis.
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Sikder, A. Effects of parasitism over two competing host populations leading to persistence. Bull. Math. Biol. 61, 179–205 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1006/bulm.1998.0087
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1006/bulm.1998.0087