Can we use disease to control biological invasion?—A theoretical research

•A pair-dynamic model was built to study pathogen's potential role in bio-invasion.•Resident necessarily has a limited colonization ability.•Counter-intuitively, more competitive invaders end in better control effect.•Our chosen pathogen should be highly infectious but not extremely virulent.

Many investigations reveal that diseases and pathogens have a certain role in promoting the control of biological invasion. They are mostly based on mean-field assumption. Only few of them have considered the local spatial effect that is more close to the reality. In this research, we developed a local pair-dynamic model based on the SI (susceptible infected) framework among competitive interaction system in which invasive species is the superior competitor. By analyzing the values of several important parameters in steady state, we find that such a disease-introduction control measure does have a reversing effect on biological invasion, but this effect can only occur under specific conditions such as: (1) native species in the target invasion system should have a limited birth rate because too large colonization ability will correspond to a worse controlling result, (2) this kind of control measure will be more effective on the invaders with stronger competitive power and (3) in terms of chosen pathogens, we should select those with high infectiousness and moderately virulent diseases. These results are confirmed by cellular automata simulation, and the verdicts are different with cases under mean-field approximation. Our findings might provide meaningful guidance for invasion control before large-scale control programmes.