IMBE, Aix Marseille Univ., Avignon Univ., CNRS, IRD, Marseille, France.
Kyoto University Wildlife Research Center, Japan.
Biol Lett. 2022 Aug;18(8):20220233. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2022.0233. Epub 2022 Aug 31.
Identifying how infection modifies host behaviours that determine social contact networks is important for understanding heterogeneity in infectious disease dynamics. Here, we investigate whether group social behaviour is modified during bacterial infection in fruit flies () according to pathogen species, infectious dose, host genetic background and sex. In one experiment, we find that systemic infection with four different bacterial species results in a reduction in the mean pairwise distance within infected female flies, and that the extent of this change depends on pathogen species. However, susceptible flies did not show any evidence of avoidance in the presence of infected flies. In a separate experiment, we observed genetic- and sex-based variation in social aggregation within infected, same-sex groups, with infected female flies aggregating more closely than infected males. In general, our results confirm that bacterial infection induces changes in fruit fly behaviour across a range of pathogen species, but also highlight that these effects vary between fly genetic backgrounds and can be sex-specific. We discuss possible explanations for sex differences in social aggregation and their consequences for individual variation in pathogen transmission.
确定感染如何改变决定社交接触网络的宿主行为对于理解传染病动力学的异质性很重要。在这里，我们研究了在细菌感染期间，根据病原体种类、感染剂量、宿主遗传背景和性别，群体社交行为是否会发生变化。在一项实验中，我们发现，四种不同细菌的系统性感染会导致感染雌性果蝇的平均成对距离减小，而且这种变化的程度取决于病原体的种类。然而，易感果蝇在存在感染果蝇的情况下并没有表现出任何回避行为。在另一个实验中，我们观察到感染的同性别群体中存在基于遗传和性别的社交聚集变化，感染的雌性果蝇比感染的雄性果蝇聚集得更紧密。总的来说，我们的研究结果证实了细菌感染会在一系列病原体种类中引起果蝇行为的变化，但也强调了这些影响在不同的果蝇遗传背景之间存在差异，并且可能具有性别特异性。我们讨论了社交聚集中性别差异的可能解释及其对个体间病原体传播变异的影响。
