Living in groups provides many benefits, such as protection from predators, easier access to food, and help with offspring care, but it also brings one major risk: infectious disease spreads more easily among social individuals. Animals don’t have doctors or healthcare systems like we do, so how do they protect themselves and their group members from disease? While highly social insects such as ants and bees live in large families and are known to protect their relatives through collective disease defences, it remains unknown how non-eusocial animals coordinate to prevent infections from spreading within their groups.
The diseaseINgroups project set out to answer this question using the red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum), a small, tractable insect that lives in crowded groups in stored grains. The project’s main objectives were to (1) establish Tribolium as a new model species for studying disease defences in groups, (2) identify the behaviours that limit pathogen transmission, and (3) uncover the underlying chemical and molecular mechanisms that coordinate these behaviours under infection risk.
The project revealed that flour beetles exhibit coordinated behavioural responses—such as grooming and removal of infected individuals—that effectively prevent pathogen transmission within groups. These findings demonstrate that even non-eusocial animals can achieve powerful, group-level protection through collective behaviour, establishing Tribolium as a new model for studying cooperation and disease management beyond family-based systems. Understanding how animals naturally limit disease spread is not only important for evolutionary biology but also for society: it can inspire new approaches to managing infections in agriculture and livestock, improve models of disease transmission, and provide insights into how cooperation and collective action evolve under pathogen pressure.
