Social interaction, and not group size, predicts parasite burden in mammals
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Social interaction, and not group size, predicts parasite burden in mammals Juliana Lucatelli1 · Eduardo Mariano‑Neto1,2 · Hilton F. Japyassú1,2 Received: 22 December 2019 / Accepted: 20 October 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Although parasitism is often considered a cost of sociality, the evidence is mixed, possibly because sociality is multivariate. Here we contrast the dependence of parasitism costs on major social variables such as group size and social structure, as measured by network metrics. We conduct two robust phylogenetic meta-analyses, comprising 43 published results for studies with group size and 32 results with social structure metrics. This is the first meta-analytical test of this hypothesis for mammals as a whole. Contrarily to theoretical expectations and previous meta-analyses, there is no relationship between group size and parasitism, but we find conflicting results when analysing different aspects of sociality. Our analysis reveals that social structure is connected to parasite load, possibly because contact between group members, and not group size, is linked to parasite transmission. While more intensely interconnected groups facilitate parasite transmission, large groups are frequently fragmented into smaller, weakly connected subgroups. Strong social modularisation should thus be favoured by natural selection to hamper parasite overload. Future empirical studies should focus on specific parameters of social network structure and on parasite transmissibility. If social structure can evolve fast, even culturally, then host/parasites evolutionary games enter into a whole new fast dynamics, and animal conservation studies should take advantage of this possibility. Keywords Social behaviour · Social network analysis · Parasitism · Phylogenetic metaanalysis · Robust meta-analysis
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1068 2-020-10086-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Juliana Lucatelli [email protected] 1
Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Rua Barão de Jeremoabo, 668 Ondina, Salvador 40170‑115, Brazil
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Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia em Estudos Interdisciplinares e Transdisciplinares em Ecologia e Evolução, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil
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Evolutionary Ecology
Introduction The evolution of sociality is a fundamental topic in behavioural research (Arnold 1990; Perrin and Lehmann 2001; van Schaik and Maria 1986), and social behaviour is certainly at the root of the success of humans as a species (Gintis 2011). Despite the positive effects of social behaviour on obtaining and allocating food resources (Blundell 2002; Creel and Creel 2002; Tennie et al. 2009), performing antipredatory behaviours (Sorato et al. 2012), and learning (Dunbar 1992, 1998), sociality also entails well known costs such as increased mate competition, reproductive suppression (Brockmann 1997), food competition (
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