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Scent-marking Networks May Help Disease Spread Between Banded Mongoose Groups

Two banded mongooses sitting close together on sandy ground
Research · Disease, parasites & microbiology

A study of banded mongoose (Mungos mungo) social behaviour suggests that scent marks can create indirect routes for environmentally transmitted pathogens. The researchers used Mycobacterium mungi as their disease model. This bacterium belongs to the tuberculosis complex and infects banded mongooses in northern Botswana. Infected animals can shed it in secretions and urine that contribute to scent marking, so another mongoose may encounter contaminated material later without meeting the infected animal directly.

The behavioural observations themselves came from an uninfected population around the Mweya Peninsula in Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda. The study therefore examined opportunities for transmission and simulated pathogen spread; it did not detect M. mungi, measure disease prevalence or document an outbreak in the Ugandan groups.

Scent marks multiplied indirect contact opportunities

Researchers used observations collected from December 2005 to November 2007 to build a contact network in which the order of events through time was retained. The dataset represented 364 individually known mongooses in seven groups in 2006 and eight in 2007. Direct-contact behaviours included grooming, marking another animal and anogenital inspection. Indirect contacts arose when one animal deposited a scent mark and another later inspected or overmarked the same mark.

The observations contained 5,021 opportunities for direct transmission. By comparison, 24,944 within-group scent-marking interactions generated 80,224 effective opportunities for indirect contact once the sequence of depositing, inspecting and overmarking was taken into account. The difference shows how a mark left in the environment can connect several animals at different times.

Indirect routes mattered most when transmission per contact was low

The researchers then simulated a hypothetical pathogen spreading through these observed contacts. When the probability of transmission from any one contact was low, indirect transmission through scent-marking contacts had more than twice the influence of direct contact on the final simulated prevalence. The biological implication is that many low-probability environmental contacts can collectively matter even when each individual encounter is unlikely to transmit infection.

The field observations did not show how often neighbouring groups overmark each other. The researchers therefore added exploratory, simulated overmarking events between groups whose home ranges overlapped. These synthetic links more than doubled the number of possible transmission routes through time and allowed simulated infection to reach a much larger part of the population. The authors interpret this as a possible two-stage process: scent marks may occasionally seed infection into a new group, after which the dense network of contacts within that group can amplify spread.

Links between groups were simulated, not observed

The study places important limits on this interpretation. The Ugandan mongooses were not infected with M. mungi; contact between groups through scent marks was modelled rather than observed; and the simulations did not include recovery, infection-related mortality, dispersal or individual differences in susceptibility and bacterial shedding. The results therefore identify plausible transmission routes, not a forecast of a real outbreak.

The broader point is that wildlife-disease models may need to include contacts that occur at the same place but at different times. A territorial scent mark can remain after its owner has left and later attract inspection or overmarking, potentially linking animals — and even social groups — that never meet face to face.

Sources and image credit

  1. Leitch, J. R., Jordan, N. R., Drake, J. M., Cant, M. A., & Alexander, K. A. (2026). Networks of indirect contact promote spread of an environmentally transmitted pathogen in a highly social species. Ecology and Evolution, 16(6), e73719. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.73719Primary peer-reviewed open-access study first published 27 May 2026 under CC BY 4.0. Behavioral data came from 364 individually represented wild banded mongooses around Mweya Peninsula, Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda. The observed network contained 5,021 direct-contact opportunities and 80,224 effective indirect-contact opportunities arising from 24,944 scent-marking interactions. Intergroup overmarking was simulated rather than observed.
  2. Leitch, J. R., et al. (2026). Banded mongoose contact observations, disease spreading simulations, and social networks [Data set]. Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f1vhhmh8nOpen supporting dataset and code associated with the primary study.

Image: Derek Keats / Wikimedia Commons / Flickr — two wild banded mongooses in Hoedspruit, Limpopo, South Africa; representative species image, not animals from the Uganda study population · CC BY 2.0 · Source

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