Our findings should lead to future investigations of whether increased network connectedness mitigates biological stress indicators (e.g., Glucocorticoid or GC content: Sapolsky, Romero & Munck, 2000; Young et al., 2014) and indeed, other systemic inflammation markers (e.g., C-reactive protein (CRP), Interleukin-6 (IL-6): Libby, Ridker & Maseri, 2002) that may influence buffering-mediated infection risk, which are currently under analysis. Here, CRP is linked to infection.