Ants receive too much of the days of smithsonianmag.com

Under cold or flu, you can keep your distance away from other people's destructive fate and, in turn, can avoid you. According to a new study, people are trying to stop the disease. In the case of infectious agents, smaller ankle antics can change behavior to avoid other members of the normal colony.

Ants are social creatures. They communicate in large groups to make sure that colonies are working to make them work. Because they are often in close contact, the ants are also exposed to infectious diseases. Research has shown that ants can maintain pain through a number of hygienic mechanisms such as garbage disposal in the hospital and the bodies of dead colonies. Scientists suspect that insects may be able to fix their social behavior to reduce the spread of infectious diseases, but this hypothesis was difficult to prove in the near future.

According to Natalie Strobeite, a PhD student at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, "Antico has hundreds of people." "So far there has been no technical methodology for measuring long-term colony-based interaction".

Fortunately, the 2013 automated tracking system, developed by Swiss researchers, provides a comprehensive overview of how Stroeyemeyt and its partners operate in the midst of 22 developed laboratory colonies. According to Stroymayt, the plant placed a small 2D barcode on the chest of ants and gave each insect a unique identifier. The camera on top of the ants has taken two pictures every second, and the algorithm of the researchers' data about the movement of the ants has detected the location of each barcode.

For four days, the squads did not calm down in their enclosures. Like some natural colonies, some ants worked with food for food outside the nest, and others, for example, the "grandmother" for the queen and the developing family, remained in the nest. On the fifth day, researchers have not made some of the 11 colonies to the fungus, but not all. Metarhizium brunneum, which is commonplace in habitats of ants and is called diseases. Producers from other 11 colonies have made a good decision to serve as a control group.

First of all, previous studies have shown that M. brunneum the fungus infects at least 24 hours of anthrax, which, in turn, gave researchers time to retain insects in the face of a particular disease.

"We wanted to pay attention [this] During the period … we can detect the active reaction of an antineoproteus from the side effects of manipulation, either of diseases or parasites, "explains Stroymayte.

Writing in a journal ScienceWhile researchers remained in their surroundings, lacquered ants spend an extraordinarily nasty time, meaning that they have little contact with the most valuable members of the colonies: the queen who builds all the colonies' eggs, and the younger than the mosques, so it takes more time to contribute to the colony. required. (Older ants put jobs outside of sleep because Stroeymeyt puts it open so they "die anyway").

The main purpose of the study is to investigate the contamination of anthrax. Mushroom meadows increase the time left by the nest. The nurses inside the nest dragged the young man inward and spent a lot of time with them, saying, "This can be regarded as spatial isolation of herders," says Stroymayte.

How did the colony know how to prevent collective farm disease? Researchers are not clear, but the smell of cocoons can be sensitive. The octaves are crushing with their antennas, constantly touching and selecting the environment of the insects. According to Stroemymet, the ants can determine in one of their colonies that they will be able to smell patogenic in their body.

Why not the unhealthy producers have reduced the time spent on the nest, another interesting question. Since they have a close relationship with their colleagues in the near future, they will be able to avoid important members of the colony. Also, by detecting their pathogenicity, they spend a lot of time in the treatment of contaminated workers. Ants produce proteins by acid; they can collect the formic acids in their mouth and consume their organogenic substances and kill each other fungi.

Even though researchers reduce the interaction between pasture and closed workers, the relationship has not been completely eliminated – it's another interesting sight. Researchers have found that the probability of the killer and nurse receiving the possible fatal mortality of the fungus decreases when these columns are used to simulate the spread of fungal pathogens in the colony against the transformation of the social network of ants, but these important antsubjects with low probability have risen.

"It's like immunization or vaccination in humans," explains Stroymayte. "These low doses do not cause death, but they give the anthropogenic development the same effect as the pathogen. This [finding] this is also a new thing.

Going forward, Stroebait plans to explore the pathogenic pathways that occur in wild colonies that can reach hundreds of thousands of thousands, leading to social change; it suspects segregation between internal and external workers in these large groups.

Associate Professor of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto Megan Frederickson concluded that "new and interesting results" brought by researchers "new methods" are not new. Such technology can help scientists to explore whether ants are changing their social networks to give each other useful microbes. And Frederickson considers it "important" [of the study] even far above the ants. "

"It's strange to me," he says, "how often other social animals organize their networks to limit the spread of the disease."

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