Unconditional versus condition-dependent social immunity
Cremer S, Pull C. 2024. Unconditional versus condition-dependent social immunity. Trends in Parasitology.
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Abstract
Socially living animals can counteract disease through cooperative defences, leading to social immunity that collectively exceeds the sum of individual defences. In superorganismal colonies of social insects with permanent caste separation between reproductive queen(s) and nonreproducing workers, workers are obligate altruists and thus engage in unconditional social immunity, including highly specialised and self-sacrificial hygiene behaviours. Contrastingly, cooperation is facultative in cooperatively breeding families, where all members are reproductively totipotent but offspring transiently forgo reproduction to help their parents rear more siblings. Here, helpers should either express condition-dependent social immunity or disperse to pursue independent reproduction. We advocate inclusive fitness theory as a framework to predict when and how indirect fitness gains may outweigh direct fitness costs, thus favouring conditional social immunity.
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2024-08-15
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Trends in Parasitology
Acknowledgement
We thank Koos Boomsma and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the manuscript.
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Cremer S, Pull C. Unconditional versus condition-dependent social immunity. Trends in Parasitology. 2024. doi:10.1016/j.pt.2024.07.014
Cremer, S., & Pull, C. (2024). Unconditional versus condition-dependent social immunity. Trends in Parasitology. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pt.2024.07.014
Cremer, Sylvia, and Christopher Pull. “Unconditional versus Condition-Dependent Social Immunity.” Trends in Parasitology. Elsevier, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pt.2024.07.014.
S. Cremer and C. Pull, “Unconditional versus condition-dependent social immunity,” Trends in Parasitology. Elsevier, 2024.
Cremer S, Pull C. 2024. Unconditional versus condition-dependent social immunity. Trends in Parasitology.
Cremer, Sylvia, and Christopher Pull. “Unconditional versus Condition-Dependent Social Immunity.” Trends in Parasitology, Elsevier, 2024, doi:10.1016/j.pt.2024.07.014.
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