ArticleNature communications2023
Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- The theory of epidemics with altruism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Social immunity in a supercolonial invasive ant: Nest structure confers immune function.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Advances in the use of entomopathogenic fungi to control ixodid ticks.Revista brasileira de parasitologia veterinaria = Brazilian journal of veterinary parasitology : Orgao Oficial do Colegio Brasileiro de Parasitologia Veterinaria · 2026Review
- Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
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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.