It’s peak cold and flu season, which means taking a lot of preventative measures. Frequent hand-washing is a must. As is avoiding co-workers or friends who are sick. But we humans are not the only animals that change behavior to keep diseases at bay. So do ants.
“So there are the foragers and the nurses — it’s two different groups of work,” said Natha of the University of Lausanne. She and her colleagues observed ants to see their reaction to the presence of a disease.
“The nurses being made of young workers typically, stay inside the nest and take care of the eggs. And the foragers are all the workers spending most of time at outside of the nest to collect food and defend the territory.”
Forager ants are at greater risk of getting exposed to diseases because they leave the safety of the nest. So the researchers sprayed a common virus on a small group of forager ants and then followed their movements to see the way other ants reacted.
“We marked all ants in the colony with individual labels, which carries these two-dimensional bar code marks like QR code which is automatically detected and recorded using a tracking system.”
After the infection, the nurse and forager ants stayed within their working places and interacted less outside of their work group. The researchers also saw that forager ants spent more time outside of the nest. “They increase that amount by 15 percent, so by quite a long large amount.”
Isolating behavior stops the spread of the virus. “Something that’s quite interesting in these ants that’s been shown by the study is that in their ability to avoid infecting other members of the community, ants may be more advanced than we are,” Natha said.
【小题1】How did the researchers track the infected ants?| A．They labeled the movements of infected ants. |
| B．They used the QR codes to follow the ants’ movements. |
| C．They had some nurse and forager ants infected with the virus. |
| D．They applied a tracking technology to record the ants’ movements. |
| A．Forager ants stayed inside the nest more. |
| B．Infected ants tended to stay away from healthy ants. |
| C．The nurses stayed inside the nest, working as usual. |
| D．Forager ants, together with coworkers, stayed outside more. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Objective. | C．Appreciative. | D．Conservative. |
| A．How ants keep diseases at bay in the nest. |
| B．Ants change movements to fight against diseases. |
| C．The measures all the ants take to prevent diseases. |
| D．Similarities between human and ants in controlling diseases. |
