Social, spatial and temporal segregation in an ant society

Abstract

Introduction Introduction Results Discussion Methods References Sociality can be risky. A chief cost of social living is increased transmission of infectious diseases, due to higher population densities combined with greater contact between susceptible and infected individuals (1,2,3,4). This greater encounter rate has led to a growing interest in the role of social contact structure in infectious disease transmission (5,6,7,8,9,10,11) To capture the dynamics of disease spread within dense groups, epidemiological models are shifting from the principle of mass action, in which infected and susceptible individuals are assumed to mix randoml ...