Figure 4

Host dispersal influences the sizes of epidemic outbreaks. Maximum outbreak sizes of two patches are denoted with grey and black curves (averaged over 50 randomly initialized runs, a = 0.55, h = 0.25, κ = 3, λ = 1, ν = 0.01). With very small rates, the two patches are practically independent in their dynamics. The minor movement of infected hosts pushes patches to maximal asynchrony (a lower small panel shows the dynamics of infected host populations) due to better consumer persistance. After the host dispersal range of symmetric complex dynamics, even stronger indirect pathogen flow causes asymmetry in disease prevalence (an upper small panel shows the part of a single run). Finally, the patches become fully synchronised with extremely strong dispersal.