Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants.
Nat Commun
; 14(1): 3232, 2023 06 03.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-37270641
ABSTRACT
Cooperative disease defense emerges as group-level collective behavior, yet how group members make the underlying individual decisions is poorly understood. Using garden ants and fungal pathogens as an experimental model, we derive the rules governing individual ant grooming choices and show how they produce colony-level hygiene. Time-resolved behavioral analysis, pathogen quantification, and probabilistic modeling reveal that ants increase grooming and preferentially target highly-infectious individuals when perceiving high pathogen load, but transiently suppress grooming after having been groomed by nestmates. Ants thus react to both, the infectivity of others and the social feedback they receive on their own contagiousness. While inferred solely from momentary ant decisions, these behavioral rules quantitatively predict hour-long experimental dynamics, and synergistically combine into efficient colony-wide pathogen removal. Our analyses show that noisy individual decisions based on only local, incomplete, yet dynamically-updated information on pathogen threat and social feedback can lead to potent collective disease defense.
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Formigas
/
Metarhizium
Tipo de estudo:
Diagnostic_studies
/
Prognostic_studies
Limite:
Animals
/
Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Nat Commun
Assunto da revista:
BIOLOGIA
/
CIENCIA
Ano de publicação:
2023
Tipo de documento:
Article
País de afiliação:
Áustria