Some ants seem to change their nests to forestall epidemics : NPR

Certain ants seem to change their nest networks to forestall epidemics, providing inspiration for illness management interventions within the human world as properly.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

Ants are many issues. Like, they’re very sturdy for his or her measurement, they usually’re intensely social. And, as Ari Daniel studies, they could be sources of architectural inspiration, too, for designing areas that scale back the unfold of illness.

ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: The ant in query is Lasius niger, the black backyard ant.

NATHALIE STROEYMEYT: It lives all over the place in Europe, and you may simply gather queens through the mating flight in July, which makes it very straightforward to work with.

DANIEL: This is Nathalie Stroeymeyt, a behavioral ecologist on the University of Bristol who research how these ants cope with a lethal fungus.

STROEYMEYT: In order to efficiently switch, it must kill its host.

DANIEL: Transforming that host ant into one thing referred to as a sporulating cadaver.

STROEYMEYT: It’s mainly utterly coated in spores, and it is extremely infectious.

DANIEL: Which places any ants close by in grave hazard. Stroeymeyt has studied how these ants reply socially to the deadly fungus by gluing tiny squares of paper with QR-like codes to their thoraxes to trace the person ants’ actions over time. First, she noticed that contaminated staff rapidly self-isolate.

STROEYMEYT: They spend extra day out of the colony to forestall contamination of their nest mates.

DANIEL: In addition, a number of the wholesome ants, the nurses that take care of the queen, eggs and larvae, improve their distance from the foragers.

STROEYMEYT: Which are those who go exterior and are extra susceptible to contracting a illness – this was a type of proactive social distancing, if you want.

DANIEL: Combined, this work revealed the ants alter their social habits to guard themselves from an epidemic and safeguard high-value members of the colony.

STROEYMEYT: And that occurs even when the nest is so simple as it may be with a single chamber. But in actuality, they occupy these nests made from a whole lot of chambers linked by 1000’s of tunnels.

DANIEL: Stroeymeyt questioned whether or not the ants additionally shift how they construct and excavate their nests when threatened by a pathogen. She teamed up with Luke Leckie, now a programs biologist at Indiana University, to analyze. He gave small colonies a day to begin constructing their nests earlier than introducing ants contaminated with the fungus.

LUKE LECKIE: We had been taking CT scans of the nests. They allow us to see the three-dimensional construction of the nest because it’s creating over time.

DANIEL: Within six days, there have been clear variations between the nests uncovered to the pathogen in contrast to those who weren’t – variations that, in keeping with pc simulations, appeared to assist decelerate illness transmission.

LECKIE: They had been sort of extra compartmentalized, they usually had been much less interconnected.

DANIEL: Nest entrances had been additionally spaced farther aside. Travel routes had been longer, making the nests much less environment friendly. But these structural adjustments enhanced the beforehand documented social response of the ants to isolate. Here’s Nathalie Stroeymeyt once more.

STROEYMEYT: It’s the primary demonstration of social species exterior of people who actively modifies the spatial construction of the setting in face of a menace. That, I discover, is completely fascinating.

DANIEL: The outcomes are revealed within the journal Science. Sarah Kocher is an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University who wasn’t concerned within the research. She says the findings deepen our understanding of one thing referred to as social immunity discovered amongst many forms of ants and bees.

SARAH KOCHER: Instead of counting on their particular person immune programs, they work collectively as a gaggle to attempt to decrease illness unfold.

DANIEL: In addition, Kocher believes these ants have one thing to show us.

KOCHER: Some of the rules may simply be utilized to the best way that we’re designing public areas that might assist us forestall illness unfold as properly.

DANIEL: Principles like defending extra susceptible members of the neighborhood and isolating sections of an enclosure. Think of it as architectural immunity delivered not by antibodies, however by ant our bodies. For NPR News, I’m Ari Daniel.

(SOUNDBITE OF JONUFF’S “CROW”)

Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our web site phrases of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for additional info.

Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts could fluctuate. Transcript textual content could also be revised to appropriate errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org could also be edited after its unique broadcast or publication. The authoritative document of NPR’s programming is the audio document.