While You Are Conducting a Study of the Optimal Growing

While you are conducting a study of the optimal growing conditions for commercially grown sunflowers in Maryland, all of the sunflower plants in the field you are studying die. You discover that an emerging fungal pathogen kills sunflowers by destroying their roots. The fungus uses honeybees, which pollinate your flowers, as a vector to transmit fungal spores among sunflower plants. The next year the farm reseeds, hoping that the fungus has died over the winter. Early in the growing season some plants begin dying again, but then the honeybee population develops colony collapse disorder and all of the honeybees die. To compensate for the loss in pollinators, the farmers introduce large numbers of bumblebees. The number of new sunflower plants that become infected during the remainder of the growing season drops to near zero. Using the variables in the susceptible-infected-resistant (S-I-R) model equation: R₀ = (S × I × g) ÷ (I × b), explain what has happened to alter the disease dynamics in the second year of your study and how this has occurred.