Reduced cellular immune response in social insect lineages.

ABSTRACT: Social living poses challenges for individual fitness because of the increased risk of disease transmission among conspecifics. Despite this challenge, sociality is an evolutionarily successful lifestyle, occurring in the most abundant and diverse group of organisms on earth--the social insects. Two contrasting hypotheses predict the evolutionary consequences of sociality on immune systems. The social group hypothesis posits that sociality leads to stronger individual immune systems because of the higher risk of disease transmission in social species. By contrast, the relaxed selection hypothesis proposes that social species have evolved behavioural immune defences that lower disease risk within the group, resulting in lower immunity at the individual level. We tested these hypotheses by m

SUBMITTER: Lopez-Uribe MM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4843217 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature