They measure only three millimeters from head to toe, but as far as managing infectious disease is concerned, ants seem to be a huge step ahead of us.
 | Socially Responsible AnimalsTwo of the characters from the computer animated film ANTZ. Ants protect their wider community from pandemics by isolating themselves, say biologists (Photo: Reuters) |
Ants are social insects, their nests can be home to millions of individuals in a very confined space, and yet they rarely suffer from pandemics.
Biologist Sylvia Cremer at the University of Regensburg, Germany, notes that this is all the more surprising because ants are genetically similar and prone to contract the same diseases. Cremer thus hopes that the invasive garden ant “will be able to teach us some lessons about how to avoid the spread of pandemic diseases like bird or swine flu”.
A Duty to Society
Most importantly, ants act socially rather than individually. As soon as one animal gets in contact with fungal spores that pose a serious threat to its health, “it realizes it carries the pathogen on its body which might extinguish the whole population and puts itself – so to speak – into quarantine,” says Cremer.
These ants move to the periphery of the nest, before they become sick, and are then treated by fellow ants. The workers even leave their job as caretakers for baby ants.
“By contrast, humans with an ordinary case of flu often drag themselves to work for days before calling in sick and thus pass the virus on,” says Cremer. By doing so, they play into the hands of the virus.
With swine flu, this is an incalculable risk, because scientists do not yet know how lethal the H1N1-virus will eventually turn out to be. “Our immune system is not yet prepared for it,” says Professor Wolfgang Jilg. Microbiologist Jilg diagnosed the first case of swine flu in Germany.
 | Picture Gallery (click on the picture to start)In April 2009, a new strain of flu virus emerged. Learn more about the H1N1 virus or "swine flu". (Photo: Center for Disease Control) |
This is another advantage ants seem to have over humans. The invasive garden ant often moves into new surroundings and thus encounters diseases it has never seen before. Yet its immune system appears to be well prepared.
“They realize that pathogens are nearby even before they are infected,” says Cremer. To find out how they do this is one of the objects of her research. “My guess would be that they can somehow smell the spores.”
Over the next five years, Cremer and her colleagues will observe ants in different scenarios, for example restricting their access to certain areas of the nest and thus simulating closed airports and schools after the outbreak of a pandemic.
Simulating Swine Flu
This experiment has provoked keen interest on the other side of the Atlantic. Vincent David and Dirk Brockmann at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, are trying to predict the spread of swine flu with the help of simulations.
However, the group’s projections of up to 2500 cases in the United States by the end of May 2009 were far lower than the number of confirmed cases—7415—by May 15 or the number estimated by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention: upwards of 100,000 likely cases in the country. “The numbers of reported cases in Mexico that we plugged in at the beginning of our model were orders of magnitude lower,” Brockmann told the New York Times.
In the future, “it will be interesting to compare our models with the findings of Dr. Cremer,” Vincent David told Allianz Knowledge. “A pandemic like swine flu is a rare event, we have very little data to double-check the results of our models.”
Furthermore, nobody knows how efficient the closing of borders and the shutting down of airports actually is when fighting H1N1. Cremer’s ants can simulate those measures without the economic drawback they would cause in real life. And the experiment can be repeated time and again.
Social insects can, it appears, teach us a thing or two about healthcare. Just so long as we do not take termites for role models: They tend to wall in their sick and leave them to die.
editor: Christian Gressner
publishing date: July 24, 2009
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