Ants redesign their nests to stop disease outbreaks

When disease threatens, ants don’t just change their behavior – they change their built environment.

A new study finds that colonies exposed to pathogens excavate nests with wider entrances, greater separation between chambers, and fewer direct connections. All these features act like firebreaks against contagion.

The research, from the University of Bristol, is the first to show a nonhuman animal deliberately modifying the structure of its habitat to reduce disease transmission.

“We already know that ants change their digging behavior in response to temperature and soil composition,” said study lead author Luke Leckie, a Ph.D. researcher in biological sciences at Bristol.

“This is the first time a non-human animal has been shown to modify the structure of its environment to reduce the transmission of disease.”

Building immunity into design

Ants are famous for “social immunity” – cooperative behaviors that blunt outbreaks. Workers groom spores from nestmates with their mouthparts and spray antimicrobial secretions. Infected individuals often self-isolate at the colony’s periphery.

In the wild, these defenses operate inside labyrinthine nests: multilevel tunnels and chambers that store food, shelter brood, and coordinate traffic.

The Bristol team asked whether the layout itself becomes part of the immune system when pathogens loom.

Using micro-CT, the researchers captured how nest architecture changes under infectious pressure – and how those changes alter disease dynamics.

Ants build under infection pressure

When the 3D reconstructions were complete, the differences were stark. The pathogen-exposed colonies built with distance in mind.

The ants spaced nest entrances farther apart, isolated chambers more, and reduced the number of direct tunnel links between rooms.

In network terms, the disease-threatened nests had lower connectivity and more modularity – features epidemiologists recognize as barriers to rapid spread.

Models confirm infection barriers

Architecture alone doesn’t prove function, so the team ran disease-spread simulations on each 3D model.

The results showed that modified nests reduced the number of ants encountering high, potentially lethal pathogen doses. Vulnerable compartments – brood rooms and food stores – were effectively buffered behind longer routes and bottlenecks.

“One of our most surprising findings was that when we included ants’ self-isolating in the simulations, the effect of the self-isolation on reducing disease transmission was even stronger in germ-exposed nests than control nests,” Leckie said.

In other words, behavior and architecture amplified each other. Self-isolation worked best in a city designed to make isolation meaningful.

What ants can teach city planners

The parallels to human settlements are hard to miss. Like ant nests, cities are networks of spaces and connections. We want the good stuff – people, goods, information – to flow, but not pathogens.

The study hints that, under elevated epidemic risk, subtle design changes can shift that balance: more entry points spread farther apart, fewer direct links between high-value rooms, and modular “neighborhoods” around critical functions.

Such principles already surface in hospital and transit design – think negative-pressure rooms, compartmentalized ventilation, and zoning that limits direct cross-traffic.

The ants’ “blueprint” suggests these strategies could be scaled or adapted more broadly when outbreaks loom.

Examples include adjustable circulation patterns in schools and offices, reconfigurable festival layouts, or transport hubs that can toggle to lower-connectivity modes without paralyzing essential movement.

An adaptive city beneath our feet

Crucially, the ants didn’t abandon efficiency. They reweighted it. By dialing down direct links and widening spacing, they traded some travel speed for resilience.

That trade-off was especially important where the stakes were highest – like brood chambers and food stores. It’s a reminder that resilience is often a design choice, not an afterthought.

The work also expands the concept of social immunity. It’s not just behaviors layered onto a fixed backdrop. The backdrop itself can become an immune organ, reshaped to slow transmission and protect the vulnerable.

In the ants’ case, micro-CT made that organ visible: a living city that quietly reengineers itself when danger appears.

Policy lessons from ants

As the threat of epidemics grows worldwide, the ants’ strategy reads like a natural proof-of-concept. With better sensing, flexible layouts, and data-informed traffic modeling, human spaces could emulate the same logic.

They could maintain the flow of resources and community while throttling the pathways disease prefers. For now, the lesson is simple and profound: when faced with contagion, these insects don’t just wash their hands. They redesign the house.

The study is published in the journal Science.

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