Data from: Opposing effects of allogrooming on disease transmission in ant societies

To prevent epidemics, insect societies have evolved collective disease
defences that are highly effective at curing exposed individuals and
limiting disease transmission to healthy group members. Grooming is an
important sanitary behaviour—either performed towards oneself
(self-grooming) or towards others (allogrooming)—to remove infectious
agents from the body surface of exposed individuals, but at the risk of
disease contraction by the groomer. We use garden ants (Lasius neglectus)
and the fungal pathogen Metarhizium as a model system to study how
pathogen presence affects self-grooming and allogrooming between exposed
and healthy individuals. We develop an epidemiological SIS model to
explore how experimentally observed grooming patterns affect disease
spread within the colony, thereby providing a direct link between the
expression and direction of sanitary behaviours, and their effects on
colony-level epidemiology. We find that fungus-exposed ants increase
self-grooming, while simultaneously decreasing allogrooming. This
behavioural modulation seems universally adaptive and is predicted to
contain disease spread in a great variety of host–pathogen systems. In
contrast, allogrooming directed towards pathogen-exposed individuals might
both increase and decrease disease risk. Our model reveals that the effect
of allogrooming depends on the balance between pathogen infectiousness and
efficiency of social host defences, which are likely to vary across
host–pathogen systems.