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Abstract
As natural habitats are lost, wildlife increasingly use urban areas. Urban environments offer novel access to resources, including food intentionally thrown to wildlife in parks. Exploiting these resources can alter wildlife behaviors such as boldness, aggression, and flocking. These behaviors in turn can shape individual exposure and susceptibility to infectious diseases, population-level transmission and the potential for pathogen sharing among urban wildlife, domestic animals, and people. Therefore, understanding the behavioral determinants of parasite transmission and impacts of urbanization on these processes is a central question in disease ecology, with implications for human health and wildlife conservation. My dissertation research quantifies behavioral variation in urban wildlife and explores the consequences of urbanization for wildlife behavior and pathogen dynamics at multiple biological scales, integrating synthetic approaches and field studies. First, I synthesize knowledge of how urbanization influences behavioral variation and parasitism, using behavior-parasitism feedbacks as a guiding framework for wildlife management and shaping future research questions. Next, I use field observations and experiments to quantify behaviors relevant to pathogen transmission in American white ibis, a species which has recently undergone dramatic behavioral and dietary shifts to exploit anthropogenic food sources in urban parks in south Florida. I quantify activity budgets of wild ibis in natural wetlands and urban parks and use experimental feeding trials to quantify how food provisioning influences ibis density. I also examine how human feeding of ibis in urban settings influences aggressive behaviors using fine-scale behavioral analyses of video data. I find that food provisioning increases flock density and aggression frequency, but reduces the time that ibis spend foraging. These behavioral responses could increase exposure to contact-transmitted pathogens but might reduce the transmission of enteric diseases with fecal-oral transmission. Collectively, this work advances knowledge of how human feeding of wildlife in urbanizing landscapes influences their infection risk by altering the behavior of individual animals.