Sublethal costs of infection reduce performance of collective tasks in social insects: a modelling study

Sublethal costs of infection reduce performance of collective tasks in social insects: a modelling study | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Article Sublethal costs of infection reduce performance of collective tasks in social insects: a modelling study Supraja Rajagopal, Takao Sasaki, Richard John Hall This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-8747129/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Under Revision Version 1 posted 10 You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract Group living confers benefits like higher efficiency of foraging, but social insects also face costs such as increased risk of parasitism. Infection can have sublethal effects on individual behaviours and can also alter social interactions among group members. These sublethal effects of infection could scale up to reduce the performance of collective tasks critical to group success, through reductions in individual performance, reduced social recruitment of new individuals to the task, and impaired information-sharing. Alternatively, learning from uninfected groupmates could mitigate individual infection costs and buffer impacts of infection on collective performance. However, we lack a mechanistic framework for quantifying how infection influences collective behaviors through direct and socially-mediated effects. We developed an agent-based model to investigate how infection influences collective foraging performance in a social insect (applied to the ant Temnothorax rugatulus ), where infection could affect individual performance through reduced motion capacity and ability to perceive and orient towards food, and social information transfer through the reduced probability of recruitment to join the foraging task. We varied the magnitude of these behavioral costs of infection in colonies experiencing low, intermediate or high levels of infection, and recorded the effects on colony performance, as well as the reciprocal effects of infected individuals on uninfected individual performance (and vice versa). We found that costs to individual performance caused larger decreases in collective performance the further upstream in the foraging task they occurred, while social costs to recruitment exacerbated these negative effects. Additionally, we found that infected and uninfected ants had reciprocal effects on each other’s performance that scale with infection prevalence, suggesting that social interactions are only likely to buffer reductions in colony performance when infection prevalence is low. Our study provides a mechanistic understanding of how infection-related changes in behaviour can impact groups, with important consequences for fitness of group living insects. Biological sciences/Ecology Earth and environmental sciences/Ecology Biological sciences/Zoology agent-based model collective behaviour social insects infection Full Text Additional Declarations No competing interests reported. Supplementary Files Supplementarymaterial.docx Cite Share Download PDF Status: Under Revision Version 1 posted Editorial decision: Revision requested 25 Apr, 2026 Reviews received at journal 22 Apr, 2026 Reviewers agreed at journal 13 Apr, 2026 Reviews received at journal 04 Mar, 2026 Reviewers agreed at journal 26 Feb, 2026 Reviewers agreed at journal 25 Feb, 2026 Reviewers invited by journal 11 Feb, 2026 Editor assigned by journal 10 Feb, 2026 Submission checks completed at journal 06 Feb, 2026 First submitted to journal 31 Jan, 2026 You are reading this latest preprint version Research Square lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal. As a division of Research Square Company, we’re committed to making research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. We do this by developing innovative software and high quality services for the global research community. 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Also discoverable on Platform About Our Team In Review Editorial Policies Advisory Board Help Center Resources Author Services Accessibility API Access RSS feed Manage Cookie Preferences © Research Square 2026 | ISSN 2693-5015 (online) Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information {"props":{"pageProps":{"initialData":{"identity":"rs-8747129","acceptedTermsAndConditions":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"archivedVersions":[],"articleType":"Article","associatedPublications":[],"authors":[{"id":590786207,"identity":"62247455-f4a4-4b40-95ca-4b4a2f00ebca","order_by":0,"name":"Supraja Rajagopal","email":"data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAZAAAAAyAQMAAABI0h/eAAAABlBMVEX///8AAABVwtN+AAAACXBIWXMAAA7EAAAOxAGVKw4bAAAAw0lEQVRIie3PoQ7CMBCA4S5NqgqzU+wVjiDhYTrDFAS1TKKq9gAQJC8w3uCWiZmy2cli0MPNECghwdI5Evq7S+5L7ghxuX4yX6NIF5P3wKwI91Cr5WwQocVFltHWmoSHM2IkaZw3R026pPxOoF4LFDVb5e0VvF1tQzgBFAk3BIGOpAUJsxdhQQxt1dG7DSGKGyJBQJMB9WwIKGZ+UWK6b/mmyOrY5jBa3vr0EY6b6qT7ZG5x2KdAEByyb/KHApfL5fqbnt7NRJY9MS40AAAAAElFTkSuQmCC","orcid":"","institution":"University of Georgia","correspondingAuthor":true,"prefix":"","firstName":"Supraja","middleName":"","lastName":"Rajagopal","suffix":""},{"id":590786210,"identity":"36c04cd9-9b95-4574-9593-64ad7f502dfd","order_by":1,"name":"Takao Sasaki","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"University of Rochester","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Takao","middleName":"","lastName":"Sasaki","suffix":""},{"id":590786211,"identity":"918e03a1-c1f6-40f6-8eae-d010f38eb7fd","order_by":2,"name":"Richard John Hall","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"University of Georgia","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Richard","middleName":"John","lastName":"Hall","suffix":""}],"badges":[],"createdAt":"2026-01-31 06:38:41","currentVersionCode":1,"declarations":"","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8747129/v1","doiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-8747129/v1","draftVersion":[],"editorialEvents":[],"editorialNote":"","failedWorkflow":false,"files":[{"id":102748745,"identity":"435c4f2e-58c0-43cb-b798-e442eea61097","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-02-16 09:11:29","extension":"pdf","order_by":1,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"manuscript-pdf","size":1097795,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"SublethaleffectsMSRajagopal.pdf","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-8747129/v1_covered_11da6156-111b-4e20-a95f-0613c2796ddc.pdf"},{"id":102731911,"identity":"ca0e1ff0-f43d-4772-bd23-3b9f58f173d1","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2026-02-16 05:18:45","extension":"docx","order_by":0,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"supplement","size":2136641,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"Supplementarymaterial.docx","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-8747129/v1/c1fc6d0f88bc52f8d8f64dcd.docx"}],"financialInterests":"No competing interests reported.","formattedTitle":"Sublethal costs of infection reduce performance of collective tasks in social insects: a modelling study","fulltext":[],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":false,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":false,"hideJournal":false,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":false,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":true,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":true,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"npj-entomology","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"Learn more about [npj Entomology](https://www.nature.com/npjentomology/)","snPcode":"44434","submissionUrl":"https://submission.springernature.com/new-submission/44434/3","title":"npj Entomology","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"stoa","reportingPortfolio":"NPJ","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true},"keywords":"agent-based model, collective behaviour, social insects, infection","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8747129/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-8747129/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003cp\u003eGroup living confers benefits like higher efficiency of foraging, but social insects also face costs such as increased risk of parasitism. Infection can have sublethal effects on individual behaviours and can also alter social interactions among group members. These sublethal effects of infection could scale up to reduce the performance of collective tasks critical to group success, through reductions in individual performance, reduced social recruitment of new individuals to the task, and impaired information-sharing. Alternatively, learning from uninfected groupmates could mitigate individual infection costs and buffer impacts of infection on collective performance. However, we lack a mechanistic framework for quantifying how infection influences collective behaviors through direct and socially-mediated effects. We developed an agent-based model to investigate how infection influences collective foraging performance in a social insect (applied to the ant \u003cem\u003eTemnothorax rugatulus\u003c/em\u003e), where infection could affect individual performance through reduced motion capacity and ability to perceive and orient towards food, and social information transfer through the reduced probability of recruitment to join the foraging task. We varied the magnitude of these behavioral costs of infection in colonies experiencing low, intermediate or high levels of infection, and recorded the effects on colony performance, as well as the reciprocal effects of infected individuals on uninfected individual performance (and vice versa). We found that costs to individual performance caused larger decreases in collective performance the further upstream in the foraging task they occurred, while social costs to recruitment exacerbated these negative effects. 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