ArticleBiology letters2023
Group size rather than social status influences personal immune efficacy in a socially polymorphic bee.
Article in Biology letters, 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, 4 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Microbial Evolution in Allodapine Bees: Perspectives From Trophallactic, Socially Plastic Pollinators.Evolutionary applications · 2025Review
- Role specialization and reproductive division of labour at the origin of eusociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Group size rather than social status influences personal immune efficacy in a socially polymorphic bee.Biology letters · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolution of group living is associated with increased pressure from parasites and pathogens. This can be offset by greater investment in personal immune defences and/or the development of cooperative immune defences (social immunity). An enduring question in evolutionary biology is whether social-immune benefits arose in response to an increased need in more complex societies, or arose early in group living and helped facilitate the evolution of more complex societies. In this study, we shed light on this question through investigating how immunity varies intraspecifically in a socially polymorphic bee. Using a novel immune assay, we show that personal antibacterial efficacy in individuals from social nests is higher than that of solitary individuals, but that this can be explained by higher densities in social nests. We conclude that personal immune effects are likely to play a role in the social/solitary transition in this species. These patterns are consistent with the idea that social immunity evolved secondarily, following the evolution of group living. The flexibility of the individual immune system may have favoured a reliance on its use during the facultative phase early in social evolution.
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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.