Group immunity against disease

Basic data for this project

Description

Living in groups comes with numerous benefits; individuals forage or hunt together, share food and caring for the young, or resist predators more efficiently. However, group-living also comes with a large cost; increased contacts and high host density encourage the spread of disease in social groups compared to those living solitarily. In order to maintain successful groups, the benefits of group-living must outweigh the costs and so we find many examples, most notably in eusocial insects, how group-living individuals counter these negative effects to fully, or partially offset the increased cost of parasite transmission. After my work on social immunity in ants with Sylvia Cremer at the IST Austria, in the Kurtz group I study the group-level immune defences in flour beetles. Eusocial insects are evolutionary highly derived with only the queens reproducing whilst the sterile workers perform other tasks, making the colony behaving and evolving as a superorganism; a reproductive entity similar to multicellular bodies. Studying insect groups with a range of social structures and/or those that are amenable to manipulations of group size and relatedness, can help elucidate the key factors influencing animal responses to diseased conspecifics and inform us about the evolution of social immunity in superorganisms.