Background: Fighting disease while fighting rivals exposes males to constraints and trade-offs during male-male competition. We here tested how both the stage and intensity of infection with the fungal pathogen Metarhizium robertsii interfered with fighting success in Cardiocondyla obscurior ant males. Males of this species have evolved long lifespans during which they can gain many matings with the young queens of the colony, if successful in male-male competition. Since male fights occur inside the colony, the outcome of male-male competition can further be biased by interference of the colony’s worker force.

Results: We found that severe, but not yet mild, infection strongly impaired male fighting success. In late-stage infection, this could be attributed to worker aggression directed towards the infected rather than the healthy male and an already very high male morbidity even in the absence of fighting. Shortly after pathogen exposure, however, male mortality was particularly increased during combat. Since these males mounted a strong immune response, their reduced fighting success suggests a trade-off between immune investment and competitive ability already early in the infection. Even if the males themselves showed no difference in the number of attacks they raised against their healthy rivals across infection stages and levels, severely infected males were thus losing in male-male competition from an early stage of infection on.

Conclusions: Males of the ant C. obscurior have evolved high immune investment, triggering an effective immune response very fast after fungal exposure. This allows them to cope with mild pathogen exposures without cost to their success in male-male competition, and hence to gain multiple mating opportunities with the emerging virgin queens of the colony. Under severe infection, however, they are weak fighters and rarely survive combat already at early infection when raising an immune response, as well as at progressed infection, when they are morbid and preferentially targeted by worker aggression. Workers thereby remove males that pose a future disease threat by biasing male-male competition. Our study thus revealed a novel social immunity mechanism for how social insect workers protect the colony against disease risk.

Data were obtained by experimental exposure of Cardiocondyla obscurior ants with the fungal pathogen Meztarhizium robertsii, followed by behavioural observation, survival experiments and immune gene expresssion measurements.