1 In Focus

comparison of social networks derived from ecological data: implications for inferring infectious disease dynamics. Journal of Animal Ecology xx, xxxx-xxxx. Social network analysis has been widely used to help understand the transmission of human diseases. Its application to wildlife disease is very much in its infancy, largely because of the difficulty of recording contacts between wild animals. Sarah Perkins and co-authors have constructed contact networks for yellow-necked mice (Apodemus flavicollis) in the Italian Alps, comparing networks derived from radio tracking and mark-recapture data. They found that the method producing the most informative data depended on population density. However, all networks had aggregated contact distributions, which is important for understanding disease transmission. Transmission of any infectious disease involves a connection between an infected host and a susceptible host. The formerly esoteric topic of network theory, concerned with describing and understanding networks of connections between objects, has grasped the imagination of the public since the making of the film Six Degrees of Separation. It is therefore not surprising that much recent attention has been given to the applications of network theory to understanding the dynamics of infectious diseas