Social environments can influence individuals’ health, reproductive success, welfare, and survival. These environments consist of diverse social connection types at multiple levels, which could influence different components of fitness in contrasting ways. Great tits ( Parus major ) exhibit a multilevel society with four major types of dyadic bonds: pair mates, breeding neighbours, flockmates, and spatial associates, all of wh...

Climate change is intensifying extreme weather events, with severe implications for ecosystem dynamics. A key behavioural mechanism whereby animals may cope with such events is by altering their social structure, which in turn could influence epidemic risk. However, how and to what extent natural disasters affect disease risk via changes in sociality remains unexplored in animal populations. By simulating disease spread in fre...

Social systems vary enormously across the animal kingdom, with important implications for ecological and evolutionary processes such as infectious disease dynamics, anti‐predator defence, and the evolution of cooperation. Comparing social network structures between species offers a promising route to help disentangle the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape this diversity. Comparative analyses of networks like thes...

Wolbachia are among the most prevalent and widespread endosymbiotic bacteria on Earth. Wolbachia 's success in infecting an enormous number of arthropod species is attributed to two features: the range of phenotypes they induce in their hosts, and their ability to switch between host species. Whilst much progress has been made in elucidating their induced phenotypes, our understanding of Wolbachia host‐shifting is still very l...

The sugars that coat the outsides of viruses and host cells are key to successful disease transmission, but they remain understudied compared to other molecular features. Understanding the comparative zoology of glycosylation ‐ and harnessing it for predictive science ‐ could help close the molecular gap in zoonotic risk assessment.

The SARS‐CoV‐2 pandemic has led to increased concern over transmission of pathogens from humans to animals, and its potential to threaten conservation and public health. To assess this threat, we reviewed published evidence of human‐to‐wildlife transmission events, with a focus on how such events could threaten animal and human health. We identified 97 verified examples, involving a wide range of pathogens; however, reported h...

The structure of wild animal social systems depends on a complex combination of intrinsic and extrinsic drivers. Population structuring and spatial behaviour are key determinants of individuals’ observed social behaviour, but quantifying these spatial components alongside multiple other drivers remains difficult due to data scarcity and analytical complexity. We used a 43‐year dataset detailing a wild red deer population to in...

Most emerging pathogens of humans can infect multiple host species (Woolhouse & Gowtage‐Sequeria, 2005). This simple fact has motivated multiple large‐scale, comparative analyses of the drivers of pathogen sharing and zoonotic pathogen richness among hosts as well as the factors determining the zoonotic potential of pathogens themselves. However, most of this work focuses on viruses, limiting a broader understanding of how hos...