ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Unraveling the disease consequences and mechanisms of modular structure in animal social networks.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 70 papers.
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Who cites it
70 citing papers in PubMed, 187 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social Structure of Sheep Flocks at Points of the Production Cycle and Relationship to Disease Spread, Using a Simulated Epidemic of Footrot.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Drivers of Viral Prevalence in Landscape-Scale Pollinator Networks Across Europe: Honey Bee Viral Density, Niche Overlap With This Reservoir Host and Network Architecture.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Inferring epidemiological parameters under an infectious phylogeography model with visitor dynamics.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Spatial organization within social ambrosia beetle nests limits spread of infectious disease.iScience · 2025Article
- The Population Ecological Characteristics of Gongshan Muntjac (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Modularity of Online Social Networks and COVID-19 Misinformation Spreading in Russia: Combining Social Network Analysis and National Representative Survey.JMIR infodemiology · 2025Article
- Breathing synchrony shapes respiratory disease risk in bottlenose dolphins.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Outcomes of Selective Removals for Control of Pneumonia in a Bighorn Sheep Metapopulation.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Connecting the dots: Managing species interaction networks to mitigate the impacts of global change.eLife · 2025Review
- Movement decisions driving metapopulation connectivity respond to social resources in a long-lived ungulate, bighorn sheep (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Heat stress conditions affect the social network structure of free-ranging sheep.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- The role of social attraction and social avoidance in shaping modular networks.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Variation in local population size predicts social network structure in wild songbirds.The Journal of animal ecology · 2023Article
- How behavioural ageing affects infectious disease.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Seasonal changes in network connectivity and consequences for pathogen transmission in a solitary carnivore.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The spectral underpinnings of pathogen spread on animal networks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The interplay of social constraints and individual variation in risk tolerance in the emergence of superspreaders.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Sharing fluids shapes host social networks and pathogen traits.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Identifying Potential Super-Spreaders and Disease Transmission Hotspots Using White-Tailed Deer Scraping Networks.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
10 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Disease risk is a potential cost of group living. Although modular organization is thought to reduce this cost in animal societies, empirical evidence toward this hypothesis has been conflicting. We analyzed empirical social networks from 43 animal species to motivate our study of the epidemiological consequences of modular structure in animal societies. From these empirical studies, we identified the features of interaction patterns associated with network modularity and developed a theoretical network model to investigate when and how subdivisions in social networks influence disease dynamics. Contrary to prior work, we found that disease risk is largely unaffected by modular structure, although social networks beyond a modular threshold experience smaller disease burden and longer disease duration. Our results illustrate that the lowering of disease burden in highly modular social networks is driven by two mechanisms of modular organization: network fragmentation and subgroup cohesion. Highly fragmented social networks with cohesive subgroups are able to structurally trap infections within a few subgroups and also cause a structural delay to the spread of disease outbreaks. Finally, we show that network models incorporating modular structure are necessary only when prior knowledge suggests that interactions within the population are highly subdivided. Otherwise, null networks based on basic knowledge about group size and local contact heterogeneity may be sufficient when data-limited estimates of epidemic consequences are necessary. Overall, our work does not support the hypothesis that modular structure universally mitigates the disease impact of group living.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.