Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2016 Jan 13;66(2):118–129. doi: 10.1093/biosci/biv179

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic or until permissions are revoked in writing. Upon expiration of these permissions, PMC is granted a perpetual license to make this article available via PMC and Europe PMC, consistent with existing copyright protections.

PMC Copyright notice

Figure 5. — A conceptual diagram of the metapopulation dynamics of plague and prairie dogs. The perceived abundance of the prairie dog population is shown in gray. The numbers of prairie dogs infected with Yersinia pestis are shown in dark gray. A plague outbreak in population A may cause a die-off in the hosts, but the pathogen is transmitted to nearby populations (light gray arrows). In the new populations, Y. pestis may (a) smolder and transmit slowly (e.g., population B), (b) cause a new outbreak (e.g., population C), or (c) fade out (e.g., population E). Subsequent spread (dark gray arrows) may occur from populations actively experiencing die-offs (e.g., population C to population D) or from populations experiencing smoldering plague transmission (e.g., population B to population C). Across a mosaic of prairie dog colonies on the landscape, plague may therefore be absent, smoldering, fading out, or causing die-offs. Researchers monitoring prairie dog colonies may not notice declines in population density (background gray) in the cases in which fade-out or smoldering transmission occurs; therefore, there is an observer bias in understanding Y. pestis’ presence and spread.