TY - JOUR A1 - Biedermann, P. H. W. A1 - Rohlfs, M. A1 - McMahon, Dino Peter A1 - Meunier, J. ED - Elgar, M. A. T1 - Editorial: Microbial Drivers of Sociality – From Multicellularity to Animal Societies N2 - While sociality is present in a taxonomically diverse number of species, most animals remain solitary (Bourke, 2011). Over the last centuries, this apparent imbalance in social and non-social animals has led to a great deal of research aimed at shedding light on the biotic and abiotic factors explaining the emergence and maintenance of sociality in nature (West et al., 2015). Among them, microbes were quickly identified as a major problem for the evolution of social life, because frequent contact between group members typically facilitates the transmission of pathogens, high nest fidelity favours the establishment of microbial pathogens close to their social hosts and, finally, because social groups often exhibit limited genetic diversity and thus limited genetic resistance against certain pathogen strains (Schmid-Hempel, 1998; Cremer et al., 2007). However, this long-standing view has changed considerably over the last few years. Recent research indeed revealed that group living may be more effective than solitary living to Limit the risk of infection by pathogenic microbes because group living also allows the development of an additional layer of defence against pathogens in the form of social immunity (Cremer et al., 2007; Cotter and Kilner, 2010). Under strong pressure from pathogens, microbes could therefore promote, rather than hinder, the evolutionary transition from solitary to group Living (Meunier, 2015; Biedermann and Rohlfs, 2017). Moreover, we are increasingly aware that many microbes provide essential benefits to their hosts by performing critical digestive, physiological, and reproductive functions (Engel and Moran, 2013; McFall-Ngai et al., 2013). The need to Access beneficial microbes may thus have played a role in the expression of frequent and tight interactions between conspecifics and ultimately promoted social evolution (Wilson, 1971; Onchuru et al., 2018). Finally, a growing number of studies suggest that microbes could enforce the Aggregation and expression of cooperative behaviours of the hosts to increase their chance of reaching new hosts and may therefore be involved in the evolution of host sociality (Lewin-Epstein et al., 2017) (but see Johnson and Foster, 2018). KW - Microbe KW - Sociality KW - Multicellularity KW - Evolution KW - Symbiosis PY - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-538741 SN - 2296-701X VL - 9 SP - 1 EP - 4 PB - Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution CY - Melbourne, Australia AN - OPUS4-53874 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -