--- res: bibo_abstract: - 'Entomopathogenic fungi are potent biocontrol agents that are widely used against insect pests, many of which are social insects. Nevertheless, theoretical investigations of their particular life history are scarce. We develop a model that takes into account the main distinguishing features between traditionally studied diseases and obligate killing pathogens, like the (biocontrol-relevant) insect-pathogenic fungi Metarhizium and Beauveria. First, obligate killing entomopathogenic fungi produce new infectious particles (conidiospores) only after host death and not yet on the living host. Second, the killing rates of entomopathogenic fungi depend strongly on the initial exposure dosage, thus we explicitly consider the pathogen load of individual hosts. Further, we make the model applicable not only to solitary host species, but also to group living species by incorporating social interactions between hosts, like the collective disease defences of insect societies. Our results identify the optimal killing rate for the pathogen that minimises its invasion threshold. Furthermore, we find that the rate of contact between hosts has an ambivalent effect: dense interaction networks between individuals are considered to facilitate disease outbreaks because of increased pathogen transmission. In social insects, this is compensated by their collective disease defences, i.e., social immunity. For the type of pathogens considered here, we show that even without social immunity, high contact rates between live individuals dilute the pathogen in the host colony and hence can reduce individual pathogen loads below disease-causing levels.@eng' bibo_authorlist: - foaf_Person: foaf_givenName: Sebastian foaf_name: Novak, Sebastian foaf_surname: Novak foaf_workInfoHomepage: http://www.librecat.org/personId=461468AE-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87 - foaf_Person: foaf_givenName: Sylvia foaf_name: Cremer, Sylvia foaf_surname: Cremer foaf_workInfoHomepage: http://www.librecat.org/personId=2F64EC8C-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87 orcid: 0000-0002-2193-3868 bibo_doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2015.02.018 bibo_issue: '5' bibo_volume: 372 dct_date: 2015^xs_gYear dct_language: eng dct_publisher: Elsevier@ dct_title: 'Fungal disease dynamics in insect societies: Optimal killing rates and the ambivalent effect of high social interaction rates@' ...