In FY2018, this project progressed in testing the trade-off between the costs and benefits of social interactions as they relate to information transmission and infectious disease. The main activities were: (i) continued tweaking of our model of social network evolution in consideration of the above-mentioned costs and benefits; (ii) trips to Scotland to initiate collaboration on a project involving fruit flies and then running the designed experiments to observe social interactions when target individuals are artificially infected with bacterial pathogens; (iii) the continued work on a manuscript documenting dynamics in how social networks influence disease transmission at different stages of an epidemic. The empirical fruit fly data will be critical to test parameters of such models.