Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants

Casillas Perez, Barbara E; Bod'Ová, Katarína; Grasse, Anna V; Tkačik, Gašper; Cremer, Sylvia

Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants

Casillas Perez BE, Bodova K, Grasse AV, Tkačik G, Cremer S. 2023. Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants. Nature Communications. 14, 3232.

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2023_NatureComm_CasillasPerez.pdf 2.36 MB

DOI

10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y

Journal Article | Published | English

Scopus indexed

Author

Casillas Perez, Barbara E^ISTA; Bodova, Katarina^ISTA ; Grasse, Anna V^ISTA; Tkacik, Gasper^ISTA ; Cremer, Sylvia^ISTA

Department

Cremer Group
Tkacik Group

Grant

Epidemics in ant societies on a chip
Information processing and computation in fish groups

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.

Publishing Year

2023

Date Published

2023-06-03

Journal Title

Nature Communications

Acknowledgement

We thank Mike Bidochka for the fungal strains, the ISTA Social Immunity Team for ant collection, Hanna Leitner for experimental and molecular support, Jennifer Robb and Lukas Lindorfer for microscopy, and the LabSupport Facility at ISTA for general laboratory support. We further thank Victor Mireles, Iain Couzin, Fabian Theis and the Social Immunity Team for continued feedback throughout, and Michael Sixt, Yuko Ulrich, Koos Boomsma, Erika Dawson, Megan Kutzer and Hinrich Schulenburg for comments on the manuscript. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant No. 771402; EPIDEMICSonCHIP) to SC, from the Scientific Grant Agency of the Slovak Republic (Grant No. 1/0521/20) to KB, and the Human Frontier Science Program (Grant No. RGP0065/2012) to GT.

Acknowledged SSUs

Lab Support Facility

Volume

Article Number

3232

eISSN

2041-1723

IST-REx-ID

13127

Cite this

Casillas Perez BE, Bodova K, Grasse AV, Tkačik G, Cremer S. Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants. Nature Communications. 2023;14. doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y

Casillas Perez, B. E., Bodova, K., Grasse, A. V., Tkačik, G., & Cremer, S. (2023). Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants. Nature Communications. Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y

Casillas Perez, Barbara E, Katarina Bodova, Anna V Grasse, Gašper Tkačik, and Sylvia Cremer. “Dynamic Pathogen Detection and Social Feedback Shape Collective Hygiene in Ants.” Nature Communications. Springer Nature, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y.

B. E. Casillas Perez, K. Bodova, A. V. Grasse, G. Tkačik, and S. Cremer, “Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants,” Nature Communications, vol. 14. Springer Nature, 2023.

Casillas Perez BE, Bodova K, Grasse AV, Tkačik G, Cremer S. 2023. Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants. Nature Communications. 14, 3232.

Casillas Perez, Barbara E., et al. “Dynamic Pathogen Detection and Social Feedback Shape Collective Hygiene in Ants.” Nature Communications, vol. 14, 3232, Springer Nature, 2023, doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y.

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