Amazing stuff!
"... Researchers have found yet another way ants are masters of disease prevention: They restructure their nests to stop pathogens from spreading.
Ant hills look like a series of chambers connected by tunnels, where each chamber serves a purpose, for example storing food or housing the young. Since real ant hills are built underground and are hard to study, researchers placed about 200 worker ants in 10-centimeter jars to dig in the lab. Half the colonies were control groups, and half had ants exposed to an infectious pathogen. When the researchers imaged the ant hills’ structures using micro CT scans, they found that the disease-exposed colonies built entrances that were further apart, and that their chambers were less easily connected, providing fewer opportunities for a healthy ant to bump into an infected one.
The team then simulated how a pathogen would spread within the lab-built structures, finding that the disease-exposed colonies’ architecture reduced transmission. The effect strengthened when they simulated ants also implementing social distancing, a behavior the same team had previously discovered. ..."
From the editor's summary and abstract:
"Editor’s summary
Sociality is essential to many species, but it can come with the downside of increasing the transmission of disease. Many species have thus evolved strategies that limit disease transmission, even within highly social species. Leckie et al. tested whether the introduction of a pathogen through nest mate exposure altered patterns of nest construction in black garden ants. They found that the presence of individuals exposed to a pathogen led to architectural changes within the nest, such as an increase in the distance between entrances, and models showed that these changes reduced disease transmission. ...
Abstract
In animal groups, spatial structure shapes social interaction patterns, thereby influencing the transmission of infectious diseases. Active modifications to the spatial environment could therefore be a potent tool to mitigate epidemic risk. We tested whether Lasius niger ants modify their nest architecture in response to pathogens by introducing control- or pathogen-treated individuals into nest-digging groups and monitoring three-dimensional nest morphogenesis.
Pathogen exposure led to architectural changes, including faster nest growth, increased interentrance distance, transmission-inhibitory changes in nest network topology, and reduced chamber centrality.
Simulations confirmed that these changes reduced transmission and highlighted a synergy between architectural and behavioral responses to disease. These results provide evidence for architectural immunity in a social animal and offer insights into how spatial organization can be leveraged to decrease epidemic susceptibility."
Architectural immunity: Ants alter their nest networks to prevent epidemics (no public access)
Architectural Immunity: ants alter their nest networks to fight epidemics (preprint, open access)
Figure 1. Experimental protocol and nest network extraction.
Figure 3. Pathogen-induced architectural modifications 6 days after treatment.
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