How Emergent Social Patterns in Allogrooming Combat Parasitic Infections

Wilson, Shelby; Sindi, Suzanne; Brooks, Heather Z.; Hohn, Maryann E.; Price, Candice; Radunskaya, Ami; Williams, Nakeya D.; Fefferman, Nina H.

doi:10.3389/fevo.2020.00054

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…This lack of social distancing, with an even higher connectivity of infested individuals, contradicts the organizational immunity predictions, whereas an increase in caregiving could be a reasonable explanation from a social immune perspective, as this behavior might help to reduce the parasite load ( 32 ). However, we should consider that caregiving behavior, which requires physical contact, can have opposing effects: It can reduce infection levels by killing some of the mites attacking the infested bees, but it could also facilitate its spread to the caregivers ( 45 ). Our combined results indicate that social distancing occurs at large scale (i.e., colony level) but not at a smaller scale (within a cohort of bees), where caregiving behavior seems to prevail.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Honey bees increase social distancing when facing the ectoparasite Varroa destructor

et al. 2021

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Honey bees increase social distancing when facing the ectoparasite Varroa destructor

et al. 2021

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“…Allogrooming (i.e. the selective removal of ectoparasites from conspecifics' skin) inherently combats ectoparasite infection, with important ecological and evolutionary consequences (Johnson et al 2010;Wilson et al 2020). For the grooming individual, the behaviour comes with obvious costs: for example, time spent grooming detracts from other important behaviours like vigilance (Mooring & Hart 1995).…”

Section: Groomingmentioning

confidence: 99%

One hand washes the other: cooperation and conflict in hygiene and immunity

Albery¹

2022

Preprint

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In humans and wild animals, pathogens impose costs on both the individual and the social group as a whole. To minimise these costs, group-living species have evolved many hygienic and immune traits that benefit from cooperation between individuals, thereby subjecting them to the laws of social evolution. Such social contracts include reciprocal grooming, altruistic self-isolation, spiteful treatment of infected individuals, and costly immune resistance responses. In highly social animals such as eusocial insects, these traits often present as complex “collective” or “social” immune systems. Even the expression of individual-level phenotypes such as sickness behaviours and immunological tolerance can depend heavily on social context, and understanding whether such responses present a benefit for the individual, the group, or both can be critical for understanding their functions and eco-evolutionary consequences. As yet, our consideration of these traits has mostly concerned individuals, or collective immunity in eusocial insect taxa. Consequently, their broader epidemiological consequences and implications for the evolution of sociality are relatively unclear. Here, I describe a wide number of socially evolved hygienic and immune traits in wild animals, both in social insects and in other taxa. I outline the problems that emerge when evolving and enforcing these anti-disease functions, discussing the conflicts that arise and their implications for evolutionary and cultural transitions in social complexity, and their potential analogues in human public health.

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“…Social structure can also directly influence the infectiousness of contacts, either because the contact process itself affects the severity of infection for the parasite source (e.g. allo-grooming) or because the density of exposures dilutes the number of parasites likely to colonise subsequent social partners (shown empirically in ants by Theis et al 2015 and modelled by Wilson et al 2020 ). Finally, infection avoidance behaviours may depend on cues or signals that are not well matched to ectoparasite transmission risk (Kavaliers et al 2003 ; Sarabian et al 2018 ).…”

Section: Key Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of social structure and dynamics in the maintenance of endemic disease

Silk

Fefferman

2021

Behav Ecol Sociobiol

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Social interactions are required for the direct transmission of infectious diseases. Consequently, the social network structure of populations plays a key role in shaping infectious disease dynamics. A huge research effort has examined how specific social network structures make populations more (or less) vulnerable to damaging epidemics. However, it can be just as important to understand how social networks can contribute to endemic disease dynamics, in which pathogens are maintained at stable levels for prolonged periods of time. Hosts that can maintain endemic disease may serve as keystone hosts for multi-host pathogens within an ecological community, and also have greater potential to act as key wildlife reservoirs of agricultural and zoonotic diseases. Here, we examine combinations of social and demographic processes that can foster endemic disease in hosts. We synthesise theoretical and empirical work to demonstrate the importance of both social structure and social dynamics in maintaining endemic disease. We also highlight the importance of distinguishing between the local and global persistence of infection and reveal how different social processes drive variation in the scale at which infectious diseases appear endemic. Our synthesis provides a framework by which to understand how sociality contributes to the long-term maintenance of infectious disease in wildlife hosts and provides a set of tools to unpick the social and demographic mechanisms involved in any given host–pathogen system. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00265-021-03055-8.

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How Emergent Social Patterns in Allogrooming Combat Parasitic Infections

Cited by 8 publications

References 38 publications

Honey bees increase social distancing when facing the ectoparasite Varroa destructor

Honey bees increase social distancing when facing the ectoparasite Varroa destructor

One hand washes the other: cooperation and conflict in hygiene and immunity

The role of social structure and dynamics in the maintenance of endemic disease

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