Destructive disinfection of infected brood prevents systemic disease spread in ant colonies
| Autor: | Christopher D Pull, Line V Ugelvig, Florian Wiesenhofer, Anna V Grasse, Simon Tragust, Thomas Schmitt, Mark JF Brown, Sylvia Cremer |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: |
Metarhizium
brood QH301-705.5 Science ddc:570 Antibiosis host-pathogen interactions Animals social immunity Biology (General) Social Behavior social evolution Metarhizium brunneum Lasius neglectus Behavior Animal Ants fungi Pupa Aggression Disinfection Genomics and Evolutionary Biology Medicine Other Research Article |
| Zdroj: | eLife eLife, Vol 7 (2018) |
| Popis: | In social groups, infections have the potential to spread rapidly and cause disease outbreaks. Here, we show that in a social insect, the ant Lasius neglectus, the negative consequences of fungal infections (Metarhizium brunneum) can be mitigated by employing an efficient multicomponent behaviour, termed destructive disinfection, which prevents further spread of the disease through the colony. Ants specifically target infected pupae during the pathogen’s non-contagious incubation period, utilising chemical ‘sickness cues’ emitted by pupae. They then remove the pupal cocoon, perforate its cuticle and administer antimicrobial poison, which enters the body and prevents pathogen replication from the inside out. Like the immune system of a metazoan body that specifically targets and eliminates infected cells, ants destroy infected brood to stop the pathogen completing its lifecycle, thus protecting the rest of the colony. Hence, in an analogous fashion, the same principles of disease defence apply at different levels of biological organisation. eLife digest Ants live in crowded societies where disease can spread rapidly and take a heavy toll on the community. Ants have a number of ways to prevent these outbreaks before they become a problem. Like many other social species, they practice good hygiene and groom nest mates that have picked up a pathogen, which helps them to recover and to reduce the likelihood of the disease spreading. Unlike other social species, ants appear to have evolved collective disease defence, or social immunity, because their colonies behave like a ‘superorganism’, in which the society behaves much like a single organism would. Like an individual animal that has an infection, the colony needs to be able to eliminate infections collectively when a nest mate falls ill, to prevent the disease from spreading. To understand how an ant colony protects itself when the care fails and a colony member contracts a lethal infection, Pull et al. infected the brood of the invasive garden ant with a common soil fungus. Using a combination of chemical analyses and behavioural observations, it was shown that the infected pupae emitted a chemical cue, which the tending ants could detect. Using a microscopic camera, Pull et al. found that when the ants sensed the cue, they would unpack the infected pupae from their cocoons and bite them. They then sprayed them with an antiseptic poison, which entered the hole in the pupae’s body, killing both the pupae and the fungus inside, before it had a chance to spread. This process of destructive disinfection may seem like a large sacrifice, but it helps to protect the rest of the colony from a fungus that could lead to much greater damage. The tending ants were acting within the superorganism of the colony much like immune cells act within an individual’s body – honing in on infected cells and destroying them before the pathogen can spread to other cells. This suggests that the ability to detect and destroy harmful elements was necessary for both the evolution of multicellular organisms, and from single animals to superorganisms. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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