This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Lucy Wong.

It's peak cold and flu season, which means taking a lot of preventative measures.

Frequent hand washing is a must, as is avoiding coworkers or friends who are sick.

But we, humans, are not the only animal that change behavior to keep diseases at bay.

So do ants.

So is the 4-Hs and the nurses.

It's just two different groups of work.

Natalie Stromet of the University of Lucianne.

She and colleagues observed ants to see their reaction to the presence of a pathogen.

With the nurses staying inside the nest, taking care of the brood and being made of young workers typically.

And the four ages are all the workers that go outside of the nest to

collect food and defend the territory. Forager ants are at a greater risk of getting exposed to

diseases because they leave the safety of the nest.

So the researchers sprayed a common fungus on a small group of forger ants and then followed

their movements to see the way the other ants reacted. We marked all ants in the colony

with individual labels which carry these two-dimensional barcode marks

like a QR code, which is automatically detected and recorded using a tracking system.

After the infection the nurse and forger ants stayed within their clicks and

interacted less outside of their work group. The researchers also saw that forger ants

spent more time outside of the nest. They increased that amount by 15% so by

quite a large amount. The researchers also measured the amount of fungus on each ant and saw that it was almost completely

contained to the foragers group. Some nurse ants and even the queen did have trace amounts of the

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