Parasites love the most important

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

One can hardly envy someone who is at the bottom rung of the hierarchical ladder: he has to dodge the jabs of higher-ranking individuals, he rarely gets enough food, because food usually goes to the same high-ranking ones, he does not have to rely on marriage partners - because with marriage partners, the situation is the same as with food.

And in general, all this incessant stress associated with low social status should be harmful to health. Numerous observations of birds, mice and monkeys indicate that low-ranking individuals do get sick more often; For example, we have already written that in rhesus monkeys a low social rank provokes chronic inflammation.

Does this mean that those at the top of the social pyramid are doing well with their health? Not really. In a recent article in Scientific Reports, researchers at the University of Notre Dame write that dominant individuals are very fond of parasites.

Dominant individuals can eat and mate as much as they want, but at the same time they greatly increase the risk of contracting a parasitic infection.

Bobby Habig and his colleagues analyzed dozens of other people's papers on parasitic diseases in animals. In total, statistics covered 31 species, and in most species, dominant individuals are more likely than others to carry some kind of parasites. The strongest connection between parasitic infection and social rank was observed in mammals, especially in those in which sexual activity depended on position in the hierarchy.

Why this happens is quite understandable. On the one hand, the dominant male (or female) can search for food without fear of being bitten, pushed or butted by one of his own - that is, the most important one feeds completely calmly, and along with the food receives more parasites, which are just waiting to get into the new master.

On the other hand, parasites are transmitted not only by the fecal-oral route, but also by the genitourinary route - accordingly, those who mate freely with many partners are more likely to catch an infection. So when we say that parasites love leaders, we mean that it is easier for them to get into them.

Finally, there is another, less direct explanation: in dominant individuals, a lot of energy is spent on mating rituals, on reproduction and on protecting their status, and therefore there are few resources left for immunity - and immunity, being on a starvation diet, poorly protects the body from various diseases …

The Scientist portal clarifies that the authors of the study considered only those works that dealt with parasitic worms, but perhaps the same applies to other parasites. However, it is still impossible to say whether dominant individuals suffer so much from the fact that parasites stick to them; here you need to specifically check how long the leaders live with parasites and the leaders without parasites. It also cannot be ruled out that parasitic organisms themselves can help fight parasites of other species, thereby bringing a kind of benefit to their host.

Here, by the way, one cannot but recall another work published last year in Current Biology. It was about the fact that dominant mice react more sharply to attempts to challenge their status, and therefore they are more susceptible to depression - after all, someone is always claiming to be the leader. But the middle peasants, on the contrary, perceive status shake-ups relatively easily: they are accustomed to the fact that there are other mice in the world that can hit them in the head, literally and figuratively.