Forager ants do it, vampire bats do it, guppies do it, and mandrills do it. Long before humans learned about and started “social distancing due to COVID-19,” animals in nature intuitively practiced social distancing when one of their own became sick.
Forager ants do it, vampire bats do it, guppies do it, and mandrills do it. Long before humans learned about and started “social distancing due to COVID-19,” animals in nature intuitively practiced social distancing when one of their own became sick.
In a new review published in Science, Dana Hawley, a professor of biological sciences in the Virginia Tech College of Science and colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin, University of Bristol, University of Texas at San Antonio, and University of Connecticut have highlighted just a few of the many non-human species that practice social distancing, as well as lessons learned from their methods to stop the spread of bacterial, viral, and parasitic infections.
“Looking at non-human animals can tell us something about what we have to do as a society to make it such that individuals can behave in ways when they are sick that protect both themselves and society as a whole”, said Hawley, who is an affiliated faculty member of the Global Change Center and the Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Arthropod-Borne Pathogens, which are both housed within the Fralin Life Sciences Institute.
Read more at Virginia Tech
Photo Credit: basuka via Pixabay
