The expression and impact of antifungal grooming in ants

Reber, Anabelle; Purcell, Jessica; Buechel, Séverine D.; Buri, Pierrick; Chapuisat, Michel

doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2011.02230.x

Cited by 123 publications

(140 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Moreover, the fact that nest-mates did not change their mutual allogrooming rates in our experiment indicates that there is no upregulation of allogrooming among untreated colony members when co-inhabiting the nest with an exposed individual. Yet, previous contact with infectious individuals has been reported to increase allogrooming responses towards incoming nest-mates, independent of their health status [38,48].…”

Section: Results and Discussion (A) Grooming Rates (I) Self-groomingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Opposing effects of allogrooming on disease transmission in ant societies

Theis

Ugelvig

Marr

et al. 2015

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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One contribution of 14 to a theme issue 'The sociality-health -fitness nexus in animal societies'. To prevent epidemics, insect societies have evolved collective disease defences that are highly effective at curing exposed individuals and limiting disease transmission to healthy group members. Grooming is an important sanitary behaviour-either performed towards oneself (self-grooming) or towards others (allogrooming)-to remove infectious agents from the body surface of exposed individuals, but at the risk of disease contraction by the groomer. We use garden ants (Lasius neglectus) and the fungal pathogen Metarhizium as a model system to study how pathogen presence affects self-grooming and allogrooming between exposed and healthy individuals. We develop an epidemiological SIS model to explore how experimentally observed grooming patterns affect disease spread within the colony, thereby providing a direct link between the expression and direction of sanitary behaviours, and their effects on colony-level epidemiology. We find that fungus-exposed ants increase self-grooming, while simultaneously decreasing allogrooming. This behavioural modulation seems universally adaptive and is predicted to contain disease spread in a great variety of host-pathogen systems. In contrast, allogrooming directed towards pathogen-exposed individuals might both increase and decrease disease risk. Our model reveals that the effect of allogrooming depends on the balance between pathogen infectiousness and efficiency of social host defences, which are likely to vary across host-pathogen systems.

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Section: Results and Discussion (A) Grooming Rates (I) Self-groomingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Opposing effects of allogrooming on disease transmission in ant societies

Theis

Ugelvig

Marr

et al. 2015

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…Thus, the genetic diversity of the colony of origin of brood and carers had no strong influence on the individual pathogen resistance of cross-fostered workers challenged in isolation. It should be noted that, by isolating workers from one another immediately after the challenge, we focus on the effect of past social interactions and individual immunity on pathogen resistance, and so might miss effects of group genetic diversity owing to variation in therapeutic behaviour, such as pathogen detection and grooming [8,15,19].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, the level of nutrition and hygienic care is likely to influence brood susceptibility to disease. Hygienic care includes mechanical removal of pathogens via allogrooming [8,9] and the deposition of substances that actively repel or kill pathogens [10][11][12]. The presence of immune-primed workers can also improve brood immune defences in some conditions [13,14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foster carers influence brood pathogen resistance in ants

Purcell

Chapuisat

2014

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Social organisms face a high risk of epidemics, and respond to this threat by combining efficient individual and collective defences against pathogens. An intriguing and little studied feature of social animals is that individual pathogen resistance may depend not only on genetic or maternal factors, but also on the social environment during development. Here, we used a cross-fostering experiment to investigate whether the pathogen resistance of individual ant workers was shaped by their own colony of origin or by the colony of origin of their carers. The origin of care-giving workers significantly influenced the ability of newly eclosed cross-fostered Formica selysi workers to resist the fungal entomopathogen Beauveria bassiana. In particular, carers that were more resistant to the fungal entomopathogen reared more resistant workers. This effect occurred in the absence of post-infection social interactions, such as trophallaxis and allogrooming. The colony of origin of eggs significantly influenced the survival of the resulting individuals in both control and pathogen treatments. There was no significant effect of the social organization (i.e. whether colonies contain a single or multiple queens) of the colony of origin of either carers or eggs. Our experiment reveals that social interactions during development play a central role in moulding the resistance of emerging workers.

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“…auto-and allogrooming, alloor self-exclusion of infected individuals, corpse disposal and/or cemetery formation (Oi and Pereira, 1993;SchmidHempel, 1998;Heinze and Walter, 2010). However, increasing frequency of allogrooming, while reducing the amount of spores on individual level, may assist the spread of pathogens among nest-mates (Oi and Pereira, 1993;Reber et al, 2011;Konrad et al, 2012). This mechanism might eventually aid the transmission of R. wasmannii among Myrmica nest-mates and it may explain its high prevalence as suggested by Csata et al (2014).…”

Section: Exploitation Of Ant Individuals: Ectoparasites Endoparasitementioning

confidence: 99%

Myrmica ants host highly diverse parasitic communities: from social parasites to microbes

2014

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Myrmica ants have been model species for studies in a variety of disciplines, including insect physiology, chemical communication, ant social dynamics, ant population, community ecology, and ant interactions with other organisms. Species belonging to the genus Myrmica can be found in virtually every habitat within the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere and their biology and systematics have been thoroughly studied. These ants serve as hosts to highly diverse parasitic organisms from socially parasitic butterfly caterpillars to microbes, and many Myrmica species even evolved into parasitizing species of their own genus. These parasites have various impacts both on the individuals and on the social structure of their hosts, ranging from morphological malformations to reduction in colony fitness. A comprehensive review of the parasitic organisms supported by Myrmica and the effects of these organisms on individuals and on whole ant colonies has not yet been compiled. Here, we provide a review of the interactions of these organisms with Myrmica ants by discussing host and parasite functional, behavioral or physiological adaptations. In addition, for all "symbiont groups" of Myrmica ants described in this paper, we examine the present limitations of the knowledge at present of their impact on individuals and host colony fitness. In conclusion, we argue that Myrmica ants serve as remarkable resource for the evolution of a wide variety of associated organisms.

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The expression and impact of antifungal grooming in ants

Cited by 123 publications

References 45 publications

Opposing effects of allogrooming on disease transmission in ant societies

Opposing effects of allogrooming on disease transmission in ant societies

Foster carers influence brood pathogen resistance in ants

Myrmica ants host highly diverse parasitic communities: from social parasites to microbes

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