TY - JOUR T1 - Disease implications of animal social organization and network structure - a quantitative analysis JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/106633 SP - 106633 AU - Pratha Sah AU - José David Méndez AU - Janet Mann AU - Shweta Bansal Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/12/106633.abstract N2 - Previous studies examining the disease costs of sociality have largely focused on the link between group size and transmission. However, infectious disease spread is driven by the structure of infection-spreading interactions between individuals.We used statistical tools to review the organization of the interaction networks of 47 species, including mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and insects by categorizing each species into one of four social systems, relatively solitary, fission-fusion, gregarious and socially hierarchical. Additionally, using computational experiments of infection spread, we determined the disease costs of each social system.Our analysis predicts consistent structural differences across social systems, regardless of species or interaction type. We find that solitary species have large variation in numbers of interactions, that socially hierarchical species are the least clustered in their interactions, and that fission-fusion species tend to be the most fragmented. However, these structural differences are primarily driven by low weighted edges, which suggests that different social systems have evolved unique strategies to organize weak ties.Disease simulations show that the organization of interaction networks can mitigate the disease costs of group living for certain social systems under certain conditions. In particular, the low clustered and fragmented interactions networks of socially hierarchical species are expected to cause frequent outbreaks of lowly transmissible pathogens, but a reduced risk of epidemic outbreaks of fast spreading infections. In contrast, the network structure of fission-fusion and gregarious species predict frequent and prolonged epidemic outbreaks of highly transmissible pathogens.By evaluating the implications of network organization across social systems, our finding offers new perspective on the debate about the disease costs of group living. Additionally, this study demonstrates the scope of meta-analytic methods in social network analysis, which in future could be used to test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses on cooperation, group-living, communication, and resilience to extrinsic pressures. ER -