Personality affects transmission and acquisition of a proxy pathogen in little brown bats

• Authors:
  • Quinn M.R. Webber
  • Craig K.R. Willis

This repository contains the code accompanying the paper “Personality affects transmission and acquisition of a proxy pathogen in little brown bats”. Scripts are under scripts/. Input data are under input/ and data generated for subsequent analyses are under output/.

Abstract

Host behaviour can affect host-pathogen dynamics and theory predicts that certain individuals disproportionately infect conspecifics during an epidemic. Consistent individual differences in behaviour, or personality, could influence this variation with the most exploratory or sociable individuals most likely to spread pathogens. We quantified personality of little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) and then experimentally manipulated exposure to a proxy pathogen (i.e., ultraviolet (UV) fluorescent powder) to test two related hypotheses: 1) more sociable or exploratory individuals would be more likely to transmit infections to other individuals; and 2) more sociable or exploratory individuals naïve to an invading pathogen would be more likely to acquire infections. We captured 10 groups of 16 bats at a time and held each group in an outdoor flight tent equipped with roosting-boxes. We used hole-board and Y-maze tests to quantify exploration and sociability of each bat and randomly selected one individual from each group for ‘infection’ with non-toxic, UV fluorescent powder. All bats were released into the flight tent for 24-hours. We then captured and photographed each individual under UV light and quantified infection intensity from digital photographs. As predicted, the most exploratory males were most likely to cause high intensities of infection in their group-mates, while more sociable males and more exploratory females had higher pathogen acquisition. Our results highlight the potential influence of host personality and sex on pathogen dynamics in wildlife populations.