Author: Cleo Bertelsmeier

In this new paper, our team has shown that the global wildlife trade increases animal-to-human pathogen transmission. Congrats to Jérome, Tristan and Mattéo, and of course our collaborators!

Read it here.

Summary: The wildlife trade affects a quarter of terrestrial vertebrates and creates opportunities for cross-species pathogen transmission, but its precise role in shaping animal-human pathogen exchange remains unclear. In our analysis of 40 years of global wildlife trade data, we show that traded mammals are 1.5-fold as likely to share pathogens with humans as nontraded mammals, and that illegal and live-animal trade further exacerbate pathogen sharing. Time spent in trade predicts the number of zoonotic pathogens that a wildlife species hosts. On average, a species shares an additional pathogen with humans for every 10 years it is traded.

Here some media posts about this paper:

UNIL, New York Times, Washington Post, Scientific American, Interesting Engineering,

Environmental conditions shape the global distribution of ant societies.

Sociality has evolved several times and is a key strategy for overcoming environmental challenges and promoting ecological success. Yet, it remains unclear how environmental conditions shape global variation in social traits of animals. With their diverse societies and global distribution, ants are ideal to test whether environmental conditions influence the distribution of animal social traits worldwide. Here, we used trait data for a total of 3,299 ant species to explore how three key social traits (reproductive structure, colony size, and worker polymorphism) vary with environmental conditions globally. We show that trait compositions are strongly structured by biomes, indicating that habitat types, as well as environmental factors like temperature and seasonality, influence sociality. Our findings highlight the crucial role of the environment in shaping the global distribution of sociality in ants, contributing to a better understanding of how complex animal societies evolved.

Read the full paper here, and the UNIL press release (in French) here.

Explaining how we conduct research on variations in ant societies, the long construction of a database on social traits in ants, and how surprised we were by the strong associations between types of ant societies and the environment. Listen to the podcast here (in French).

Talking about our new paper in PNAS on how ant societies are shaped by the environment. Listen to him here (in French).

We will organize a summer school on ‘Ant Ecology in an Era of Global Change’ in beautiful Arolla (Switzerland), 23-28 August 2026.

The dates have been chosen, so that international participants can join directly after the IUSSI conference in Freiburg (it’s only a couple of hours by train).

More info: https://wp.unil.ch/bertelsmeiergroup/antecol/