Over the past few months, humans all over the world have been socially distancing to limit the spread of coronavirus. What if I told you bees, ants, and other social insects have been doing the same thing in order to control their own pandemics for millions of years?
Nathalie Stroeymeyt’s (University of Bristol) research may contain the answer to the question that has puzzled scientists for decades - how can an infected insect travel back to its hive without subsequently wiping out its entire colony?
The answer seems to lie in a number of factors, some all too familiar to the modern human. Social insects are meticulously clean. They remove dead bodies and waste to outside their nests. However, some ant species go beyond with levels of cleanliness, spreading antimicrobial tree resins around their nest - a primordial form of hand sanitiser.
Furthermore, in a similar method to human vaccinations, some ants purposefully transfer either ‘non-lethal, low-level infections’ or antimicrobial compounds to one another while grooming, resulting in a collective hive immunity. Ants and bees also divide up tasks in a way that limits contact between groups, in an advanced form of quarantine or social distancing.
What can this teach us? While this is a relatively new area of research, there are still lessons we can learn from these much smaller civilisations. For instance, during a pandemic, termites instantly eat their young, to separate a group susceptible to creating a reservoir of infection. This doesn’t mean we should cannibalise our children, obviously - but it does suggest school closures would be a good idea.
Cleanliness, vaccination and socially distancing are all proven to be effective and stand the test of millennia - but they require putting the interest of the collective first - and it’s up to us to continue this effort in the months to come.
Written by Alfie Davis
Artwork by Zara Masood
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