Universal Dependencies - English - GUM

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Biologist Nick Bos tells Wikinews about 'self-medicating' ants

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Tuesday, September 1, 2015

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Formica fusca, from file.

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Image: Mathias Krumbholz.

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Nick Bos, of the University of Helsinki, studies 'the amazing adaptations social insects have evolved in order to fight the extreme parasite pressure they experience'.

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In a recently-accepted Evolution paper Bos and colleagues describe ants appearing to self-medicate.

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'I have no doubt that as time goes on, there will be more and more cases documented'

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The team used Formica fusca, an ant species that can form thousand-strong colonies.

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This common black ant eats other insects, and also aphid honeydew.

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It often nests in tree stumps or under rocks and foraging workers can sometimes be spotted climbing trees.

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Some ants were infected with Beauveria bassiana, a fungus.

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Infected ants chose food laced with toxic hydrogen peroxide, whereas healthy ants avoided it.

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Hydrogen peroxide reduced infected ant fatalities by 15%, and the ants varied their intake depending upon how high the peroxide concentration was.

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In the wild, Formica fusca can encounter similar chemicals in aphids and dead ants.

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The Independent reported self-medicating ants a first among insects.

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Bos obtained his doctorate from the University of Copenhagen.

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He began postdoctoral research at Helsinki in 2012.

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He also runs the AntyScience blog.

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The blog aims to help address 'a gap between scientists and 'the general public'.'

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The name is a pun referencing ants, its primary topic, science, and 'non-scientific' jargon-free communication.

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He now discusses his work with Wikinews.

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Beauveria bassiana on a cicada in Bolivia.

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Image: Danny Newman.

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What first attracted you to researching ants?

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Me and a studymate were keeping a lot of animals during our studies, from beetles, to butterflies and mantids, to ants.

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We had the ants in an observation nest, and I could just look at them for hours, watching them go about.

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This was in my third year of Biology study I think.

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After a while I needed to start thinking about an internship for my M.Sc. studies, and decided to write a couple of professors.

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I ended up going to the Centre for Social Evolution at the University of Copenhagen where I did a project on learning in Ants under supervision of Prof. Patrizia d'Ettorre.

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I liked it so much there I ended up doing a PhD and I've been working on social insects ever since.

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What methods and equipment were used for this investigation?

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This is a fun one.

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I try to work on a very low budget, and like to build most of the experimental setups myself (we actually have equipment in the lab nicknamed the 'Nickinator', 'i-Nick' and the 'Nicktendo64').

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There's not that much money in fundamental science at the moment, so I try to cut the costs wherever possible.

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We collected wild colonies of Formica fusca by searching through old tree-trunks in old logging sites in southern Finland.

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We then housed the ants in nests I made using Y-tong [aerated concrete].

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It's very soft stone that you can easily carve.

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We carved out little squares for the ants to live in (covered with old CD covers to prevent them escaping!).

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We then drilled a tunnel to a pot (the foraging arena), where the ants got the choice between the food with medicine and the food without.

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We infected the ants by preparing a solution of the fungus Beauveria bassiana.

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Afterwards, each ant was dipped in the solution for a couple of seconds, dried on a cloth and put in the nest.

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After exposing the ants to the fungus, we took pictures of each foraging arena three times per day, and counted how many ants were present on each food-source.

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Example of aerated concrete, which provided a home for the subjects.

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Image: Marco Bernardini.

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This gave us the data that ants choose more medicine after they have been infected.

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The result that healthy ants die sooner when ingesting ROS [Reactive Oxygen Species, the group of chemicals that includes hydrogen peroxide] but infected ants die less was obtained in another way (as you have to 'force feed' the ROS, as healthy ants, when given the choice, ignore that food-source.)

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For this we basically put colonies on a diet of either food with medicine or without for a while.

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And afterwards either infected them or not.

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Then for about two weeks we count every day how many ants died.

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This gives us the data to do a so-called survival analysis.

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We measured the ROS-concentration in the bodies of ants after they ingested the food with the medicine using a spectrophotometer.

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By adding certain chemicals, the ROS can be measured using the emission of light of a certain wave-length.

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The detrimental effect of ROS on spores was easy to measure.

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We mixed different concentrations of ROS with the spores, plated them out on petridishes with an agar-solution where fungus can grow on.

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A day after, we counted how many spores were still alive.

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How reliable do you consider your results to be?

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The results we got are very reliable.

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We had a lot of colonies containing a lot of ants, and wherever possible we conducted the experiment blind.

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This means the experimenter doesn't know which ants belong to which treatment, so it's impossible to influence the results with 'observer bias'.

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However, of course this is proof in just one species.

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It is hard to extrapolate to other ants, as different species lead very different lives.