article published yes Barbara E Casillas Perez author 351ED2AA-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87 Katarína Bod'Ová author 2BA24EA0-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A870000-0002-7214-0171 Anna V Grasse author 406F989C-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87 Gašper Tkačik author 3D494DCA-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A870000-0002-6699-1455 Sylvia Cremer author 2F64EC8C-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A870000-0002-2193-3868 SyCr department GaTk department Epidemics in ant societies on a chip project Information processing and computation in fish groups project 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. https://research-explorer.ista.ac.at/download/13127/13132/2023_NatureComm_CasillasPerez.pdf application/pdfno Springer Nature2023 eng 2041-1723 37270641 00100256270000510.1038/s41467-023-38947-y 14 https://research-explorer.ista.ac.at/record/12945 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.” <i>Nature Communications</i>, vol. 14, 3232, Springer Nature, 2023, doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y">10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y</a>. B.E. Casillas Perez, K. Bodova, A.V. Grasse, G. Tkačik, S. Cremer, Nature Communications 14 (2023). 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.” <i>Nature Communications</i>. Springer Nature, 2023. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y">https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y</a>. Casillas Perez BE, Bodova K, Grasse AV, Tkačik G, Cremer S. Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants. <i>Nature Communications</i>. 2023;14. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y">10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y</a> 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,” <i>Nature Communications</i>, vol. 14. Springer Nature, 2023. Casillas Perez, B. E., Bodova, K., Grasse, A. V., Tkačik, G., &#38; Cremer, S. (2023). Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants. <i>Nature Communications</i>. Springer Nature. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y">https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38947-y</a> 131272023-06-11T22:00:40Z2025-04-14T07:47:53Z