When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, we had to completely reorganize our spaces to avoid close contact. Transparent barriers were erected between seats, cashiers and customers, receptionists and patients, while stickers encouraged people to sit or stand at least six feet away from each other. A new study, however, reveals that we’re not the only ones who take such actions to lessen the spread of a disease.
If you’re thinking of chimpanzees or bonobos, it’s a fair guess—they are two of our closest living relatives. But the clever critters researchers investigated in a study recently published in the journal Science are much, much smaller: ants. As if these insects weren’t cool enough (some are better at teamwork than humans), researchers found that ants architecturally modify their nests to avoid the spread of illness. These nests had more spread-out entrances with less direct connections between chambers.
“We already know that ants change their digging behaviour in response to other soil factors, such as temperature and soil composition,” Luke Leckie, lead author of the study and a researcher in biological sciences at the University of Bristol, said in a statement. “This is the first time a non-human animal has been shown to modify the structure of its environment to reduce the transmission of disease.”
To investigate the matter, Leckie and his team put groups of 180 ants in containers of soil. They allowed these ants to build their nests for one day, before introducing 20 more ants in each container. Half of the groups received ants that had been exposed to pathogens, specifically fungal spores. They let all the ants continue building their nests for six more days, frequently using micro-CT scanning—a technique that enabled the team to see the underground nest structures in 3D—to measure their structure and growth.
The team found that “the nests dug by pathogen-exposed ant groups were more modular, had longer travel routes, had entrances spaced further apart, and had fewer direct connections between chambers. These changes are all predicted to reduce pathogen transmission,” Leckie tells Popular Science. According to the study, these modifications safeguard nest compartments of food stores and young ants.
To test the predictions, the team ran simulations of the spread of the pathogen in the 3D models of the nests six days after exposure. The simulation revealed that the pathogen-exposed groups’ architectural changes should lessen the spread of the pathogen. While these modifications alone would have a small impact on pathogen transmission, Leckie says that ants exposed to pathogens isolate themselves.
“Therefore, we introduced this self-isolation mechanism into our simulations and found that the nests of pathogen-exposed ants actually enhance the effect of self-isolation in reducing pathogen transmission,” he explains. “So, there is a synergy between architectural and social defenses to fight pathogen transmission in ants.”
Instead of always building nests that diminish pathogen transmission, ants likely respond only in the case of pathogen exposure because, like humans, they have to construct nests that enable the efficient transfer of information and resources, Leckie says.
Shop Amazon’s Prime Day sale
