Host and pathogen drivers of infection-induced changes in social aggregation behavior

Abstract

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 Drosophila melanogaster, an established system for behavioural genetics, according to pathogen species, infectious dose, host genetic background and sex. We find that systemic infection with four different bacterial species results in a reduction in the mean pairwise distance within infected flies, and that the extent of this change depends on the infectious dose in a pathogen-specific way. In the presence of infected conspecifics, susceptible flies also tended to aggregate throughout time, but did not show any evidence of avoiding infected flies. We also observed genetic- and sex-based variation in social aggregation, 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.