Data from: Transmission risk predicts avoidance of infected conspecifics in Trinidadian guppies

1.Associating with conspecifics afflicted with infectious diseases
increases the risk of becoming infected, but engaging in avoidance
behaviour incurs the cost of lost social benefits. Across systems,
infected individuals vary in the transmission risk they pose, so natural
selection should favour risk‐sensitive avoidance behaviour that optimally
balances the costs and benefits of sociality. 2.Here we use the guppy
Poecilia reticulata‐Gyrodactylus turnbulli host‐parasite system to test
the prediction that individuals avoid infected conspecifics in proportion
to the transmission risk they pose. 3.In dichotomous choice tests,
uninfected fish avoided both the chemical and visual cues, presented
separately, of infected conspecifics only in the later stages of
infection. 4.A transmission experiment indicated that this avoidance
behaviour accurately tracked transmission risk (quantified as both the
speed at which transmission occurs and the number of parasites
transmitting) through the course of infection. 5.Together, these findings
reveal that uninfected hosts can use redundant cues across sensory systems
to inform dynamic risk‐sensitive avoidance behaviour. This correlation
between the transmission risk posed by infected individuals and the
avoidance response they elicit has implications for the evolutionary
ecology of infectious disease, and its explicit inclusion may improve the
ability of epidemic models to predict disease spread.