ScienceDaily (Apr. 4, 2012) — The research team of Prof. Sylvia Cremer at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) have shown how micro-infections promote social vaccination in ant societies. Like crowded megacities, ant colonies face a high risk of disease outbreaks. These are kept in check by the ants' "social immune system" -- a set of collective hygienic behaviors and adaptive changes in interaction frequencies that acts in conjunction with the physiological, innate immune system of colony members. Prof. Cremer and colleagues now unravel how taking care of sick ants promotes disease protection in their group members.
Ants do not avoid sick colony members, but lick them to remove the pathogen from the exposed ant's body. This social grooming behavior drastically increases the survival chances of exposed individuals, but bares the risk that helper ants contract the disease. By applying fluorescence-labelled fungal spores to some ants and allowing them to interact with healthy colony members, the researchers showed that the labelled spores spread throughout the colony. Interestingly, however, spore transfer occurs at very low levels, causing only sub-lethal micro-infections in the previously healthy colony members. The authors determined that these low-level infections induce the expression of a specific set of immune genes and increase the ants' capacity to fight the fungal pathogen.
Additional mathematical modelling suggests that such social immunisation enables colonies to recover more rapidly from an infection.
Read on : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120404102303.htm
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