The Small Things, VI

"Like crowded megacities, busy ant colonies face a high risk of disease outbreaks. New research indicates such "urban ants" also know how to prevent epidemics — when an infected ant enters the colony, its nest mates carefully lick off the infecting fungus.

In nature, ants would pick up a fungal or other infection likely during foraging when they scamper across a cadaver of an infected ant or grasshopper, for instance, Cremer said.

To figure out how Lasius neglectus ants would react to such a diseased nest mate, the researchers infected one individual ant with fluorescent-labeled spores of fungus and let them interact with other members of their colony, tracking where the fluorescent spores ended up.

The researchers found that when this infected ant returned to the colony, its nest mates don't avoid it. Instead of running from the infected and contagious insect, the ants approached their colony mate and licked it, seeming to remove pathogens from the sick ant's body, a social grooming behavior."

#Teamwork