Novel pathogen introduction triggers rapid evolution in animal social movement strategies
- University of Groningen, Netherlands
- Georgetown University, United States
- University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Abstract
Animal sociality emerges from individual decisions on how to balance the costs and benefits of being sociable. Novel pathogens introduced into wildlife populations should increase the costs of sociality, selecting against gregariousness. Using an individual-based model that captures essential features of pathogen transmission among social hosts, we show how novel pathogen introduction provokes the rapid evolutionary emergence and co-existence of distinct social movement strategies. These strategies differ in how they trade the benefits of social information against the risk of infection. Overall, pathogen-risk adapted populations move more and have fewer associations with other individuals than their pathogen-risk naive ancestors, reducing disease spread. Host evolution to be less social can be sufficient to cause a pathogen to be eliminated from a population, which is followed by a rapid recovery in social tendency. Our conceptual model is broadly applicable to a wide range of potential host-pathogen introductions, and offers initial predictions for the eco-evolutionary consequences of wildlife pathogen spillover scenarios, and offers a template for the development of theory in the ecology and evolution of animals'; movement decisions.
Data availability
This manuscript presents the results of a simulation model study, and no real data were generated.The Pathomove simulation model code (v.1.2.0) is available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7789072, and on Github at github.com/pratikunterwegs/pathomove. Code to run the simulations and analyse the output is on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7789079, and on Github at: github.com/pratikunterwegs/patho-move-evol (v.1.1.0). The data presented in this manuscript are also archived on Zenodo with the DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7789060.
Article and author information
Author details
Pratik Rajan Gupte
Funding
European Research Council (Advanced Grant No. 789240)
- Pratik Rajan Gupte
- Franz (Franjo) Weissing
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO-ALW; ALWOP.668)
- Jakob RL Gismann
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2023, Gupte et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Novel pathogen introduction triggers rapid evolution in animal social movement strategies
eLife 12:e81805.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.81805
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