Dynamic pathogen detection and social feedback shape collective hygiene in ants

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-infected 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 contagions. While inferred solely from momentary decisions, these behavioral rules participate in long-term evolutionary 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.

Barbara Casillas-Pérez, Katarina Bodová, Anna V. Grasse, Gasper Tkacik, Sylvia Cremer