How Disease Risks Can Impact the Evolution of Social Behaviors and Emergent Population Organization

How Emergent Social Patterns in Allogrooming Combat Parasitic Infections

“…Of the potential selective pressures on social organization, the most natural comparator for ectoparasitic infection is, of course, pathogenic infection. Similar investigations exploring the differential fitness of self-organizing social strategies as a result of emergent robustness to pathogen transmission have been published (Altizer et al, 2003b;Fefferman and Ng, 2007;Williams et al, 2018). There are, however, some critical differences in the structure of these studies that makes their direct comparison challenging.…”

“…In this paper, we build on our previous work (Brooks et al, 2018;Williams et al, 2018) using an agent-based model of social structure emerging from ongoing grooming dynamics to consider the relative robustness of different strategies of social organizational structure with various efficiencies of allogrooming. While this model is hypothetical and abstract, it provides practical and predictive insight into the nature of evolutionary pressures from ectoparasite infections on the structure of allogrooming in social systems.…”

How disease constrains the evolution of social systems

“…Previous studies have explored the potential influences disease might have on the evolution of social behaviour and population organization in various animal societies [25–28]. Our study advances this literature by characterizing the evolutionary fitness of populations that use different organizational strategies in the face of environmental hazards and infectious diseases.…”