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Predators may be limited in their ability to kill prey (i.e., have type II or III functional responses), an insight that has had far-reaching consequences in the ecological literature. With few exceptions, however, this possibility has not been extended to the behaviour of immune cells, which kill pathogens much as predators kill their prey. Rather, models of the within-host environment have tended to tacitly assume that immune cells have an unlimited ability to target and kill pathogens (i.e., a type I functional response). Here we explore the effects of changing this assumption on infection outcomes (i.e., pathogen loads). We incorporate immune cell handling time into an ecological model of the within-host environment that considers both the predatory nature of the pathogen-immune cell interaction as well as competition between immune cells and pathogens for host resources. Unless pathogens can preempt immune cells for host resources, adding an immune cell handling time increases equilibrium pathogen load. We find that the shape of the relationship between energy intake and pathogen load can change: with a type I functional response, pathogen load is maximised at intermediate inputs, while for a type II or III functional response, pathogen load is solely increasing. With a type II functional response, pathogen load can fluctuate rather than settling to an equilibrium, a phenomenon unobserved with type I or III functional responses. Our work adds to a growing literature highlighting the role of resource availability in host-parasite interactions. Implications of our results for adaptive anorexia are discussed., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Explaining patterns of diversity has long been a central focus in ecology. One of the most challenging problems has been to understand how species occupying similar ecological niches can co-exist because, with limited resources, demographic stochasticity is expected to lead to the eventual extinction of all but one of them. The Allee effect has been widely studied for its impact on the extinction risk of rare species. Its potential role in promoting co-existence has received less attention. Here, we present a model in which two species compete for a single resource across a continuous landscape. We show that Allee effects can promote their co-existence when a simple condition is met: resources are distributed unevenly across space. Furthermore, the Allee effect can stabilize co-existence despite the reduction in population density and consequent increase in demographic stochasticity that it causes. The Allee effect might, therefore, be an important force maintaining diverse communities., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)