The abundance threshold for plague as a critical percolation phenomenon

Abstract

Percolation theory is most commonly associated with the slow flow of liquid through a porous medium, with applications to the physical sciences¹. Epidemiological applications have been anticipated for disease systems where the host is a plant or volume of soil^2,3, and hence is fixed in space. However, no natural examples have been reported. The central question of interest in percolation theory⁴, the possibility of an infinite connected cluster, corresponds in infectious disease to a positive probability of an epidemic. Archived records of plague (infection with Yersinia pestis) in populations of great gerbils (Rhombomys opimus) in Kazakhstan have been used to show that epizootics only occur when more than about 0.33 of the burrow systems built by the host are occupied by family groups⁵. The underlying mechanism for this abundance threshold is unknown. Here we present evidence that it is a percolation threshold, which arises from the difference in scale between the movements that transport infectious fleas between family groups and the vast size of contiguous landscapes colonized by gerbils. Conventional theory predicts that abundance thresholds for the spread of infectious disease arise when transmission between hosts is density dependent such that the basic reproduction number (R₀) increases with abundance, attaining 1 at the threshold. Percolation thresholds, however, are separate, spatially explicit thresholds that indicate long-range connectivity in a system and do not coincide with R₀ = 1. Abundance thresholds are the theoretical basis for attempts to manage infectious disease by reducing the abundance of susceptibles, including vaccination and the culling of wildlife^6,7,8. This first natural example of a percolation threshold in a disease system invites a re-appraisal of other invasion thresholds, such as those for epidemic viral infections in African lions (Panthera leo), and of other disease systems such as bovine tuberculosis (caused by Mycobacterium bovis) in badgers (Meles meles).