Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants.

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 behav

SUBMITTER: Casillas-Perez B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10239465 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature