Description du projet
Première enquête empirique sur le rôle de l’organisation sociale dans la gestion des risques de maladie
Les colonies de fourmis peuvent servir de modèle pour étudier la transmission des maladies en groupe. Le projet DISEASE, financé par l’UE, étudiera les colonies de fourmis afin de comprendre comment l’organisation sociale influe sur le risque de transmission de maladies entre les individus, et comment cela influe à son tour sur leur besoin d’investir dans l’immunité. Il utilisera des méthodes allant du suivi comportemental automatisé à l’analyse de l’expression génétique pour comprendre comment les colonies de fourmis ajustent leurs défenses contre les maladies en fonction de la complexité architecturale et sociale du groupe et du risque de rencontrer des agents pathogènes. Les résultats constitueront une avancée significative dans notre compréhension de la rétroaction complexe entre la socialité et la santé.
Objectif
Group-living has been predicted to have opposing effects on disease risk and immune strategies. First, since repeated contacts between individuals facilitate pathogen transmission, sociality may favour high investment in personal immunity. Alternatively, because social animals can limit disease spread through collective sanitary actions (e.g. mutual grooming) or organisational features (e.g. division of the group’s social network into distinct subsets), sociality may instead favour low investment in personal immunity. The overall goal of this project is to experimentally test these conflicting predictions in ants using advanced data collection and analytical tools. I will first quantify the effect of social organisation on disease transmission using a combination of automated behavioural tracking, social network analysis, and empirical tracking of transmission markers (fluorescent beads). Experimental network manipulations and controlled disease seeding by a robotic ant will allow key predictions from network epidemiology to be tested, with broad implications for disease management strategies. I will then study the effect of colony size on social network structure and disease transmission, and how this in turn affects investment in personal immunity. This will shed light on far-reaching hypotheses about the effect of group size on social organisation ('size-complexity’ hypothesis) and immune investment (‘density-dependent prophylaxis’). Finally, I will explore whether prolonged pathogen pressure induces colonies to reinforce the transmission-inhibiting aspects of their social organisation (e.g. colony fragmentation) or to invest more in personal immunity. This project will represent the first empirical investigation of the role of social organisation in disease risk management, and allow its importance to be compared with other immune strategies. This will constitute a significant advance in our understanding of the complex feedback between sociality and health.
Champ scientifique
Mots‑clés
Programme(s)
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Régime de financement
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitution d’accueil
BS8 1QU Bristol
Royaume-Uni