Social distancing already existed in nature to prevent disease

Humans aren’t the only ones using social distancing to thwart the spread of pathogens. A diverse variety of wildlife also practice social distancing, a behavior that plays a role in mitigating challenges posed by emerging infectious diseases for humans and wildlife. Despite host adaptations, pandemics are not uncommon in wildlife populations.

“The wide coverage of the pandemic has informed the public of the effectiveness of reduce close contact between humans to reduce the transmission of pathogenic viruses – says Mark J. Butler, senior research author of the Institute of the Environment and the Department of Biological Sciences at Florida International University, Miami-. The importance of local interactions in the transmission of contagious diseases Between hosts has long been established in the scientific literature, as has the effectiveness of host segregation in reducing the spread of pathogens. Humanity is now engaged in a massive application of social isolation designed to confer behavioral immunity against the COVID-19 virus in humans ”.

Social distancing can only be effective if it goes beyond the spatial scale on which the transmission of pathogens is likely. The current global metric for COVID-19 is the family’s recommendation that humans maintain a separation of at least 2 meters.

However, recent research on this point indicates that gas clouds from human exhalations can travel even further. Measures of the distance through which infectious pathogens can spread between hosts are generally not reported for wildlife. Among the aquatic species for which the transmission of pathogens is generally based on seawater or, it is the viability of the pathogen in the aqueous medium as well as the water flow rates that dictate the spread of infectious agents.

“Our own laboratory experiments with Caribbean lobster suggest that transmission of The PaV1 virus in lobsters in water is of the order of 2 meters, a social distancing metric that is coincidentally similar to that designed to protect humans from infection, during the current COVID-19 crisis, ”explains the specialist.

From primates to arthropods, the rather eclectic mix of species known to be involved in social distancing suggests the phenomenon has evolved independently. It is important to distinguish active social distancing from behavioral byproducts of infection in which sick people move around less and therefore have fewer social gatherings. True social distancing involves specific behaviors which have evolved in response to transmissible pathogens and parasites to increase spatial distances and thereby reduce the spread of disease.

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), our closest primate relative, is Assumed who benefit from the avoidance of individuals outside their partner groupIt ostracizes people infected with communicable diseases such as polio. Baboons, a more distant Old World monkey, choose safe social partners and avoid interactions with members of their group whom they perceive as faecal-transmitted parasites. Social distancing also affects reproductive interactions, as seen in female mice housework (Mus musculus domesticus) who avoid mating with parasitized males who could infect them. However, the extent to which social distancing is expressed may vary depending on social relationships, such as kinship.

Recent research with vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus ), whose immune system was experimentally challenged by injections of lipopolysaccharides, revealed that mother-offspring social interactions were less affected by the disease than interactions with other congeners. Species that congregate in large groups to reduce the risk of predation or improve foraging success (e.g. flocks of birds, herds of ungulates, schools of fish) present a particularly high risk of infection with pathogens and parasites, so many have developed behaviors to reduce this risk.

A little further, please

Although many species of wildlife distance themselves socially, they all need a means by which uninfected individuals can detect infectious congeners; that is, they must respond to a signal that is a reliable predictor of the risk of infection. Human social distancing and the signals we use to detect infected people are fundamentally different from practice in wild animals. In addition, Infected hosts can sometimes be asymptomatic and fail to provide visual, auditory, or olfactory cues indicating infection. It is this lack of obvious signs that makes recognizing COVID-19 infections so problematic. Absent diagnostic tests, humans rely on visual cues such as a feverish appearance or auditory cues such as coughing, sneezing, or speaking to avoid presumably infectious individuals, but the accuracy of these signals to determine a disease state is often weak.

Humans also produce unique body odors when our immune system is activated, a change in odor that dogs can detect. But people are ill-equipped to recognize the subtle changes in smell associated with infection, as the olfactory senses have diminished over evolutionary time. This loss of olfactory acuity represents an evolutionary compromise in favor of the development of improved brain function and a greater dependence on vision and verbal communication. In fact, half of the genes encoding olfactory receptors in humans are now inoperative.

On the contrary, odor seems to be the most important mechanism used by wild animals to detect diseases of their congeners, and some animals then use this information to distance themselves. Auditory detection of infectious individuals appears to be rare in nature. A rare example occurs in termites which produce vibrational signals when they encounter pathogenic fungal spores and, in response, their termite mate mates flee the signal, which is believed to reduce disease in the termite mound.

“Pathogens have immense power to stimulate population dynamics, alter community stability, and manipulate animal behavior. – adds the specialist -. The COVID-19 pandemic underscores this power in human society, but it also highlights the effectiveness of behaviors such as social distancing in reinforcing the spread of the disease. But social distancing as a behavioral immunity mechanism is not a unique human construct ”.

Several species that span the animal kingdom have developed independent behaviors to counteract pathogens, thereby increasing their innate and acquired immune systems. Animals that are evolutionarily distant from humans, such as ants, bees, and locusts, make effective and efficient use of social distancing, perhaps in part due to their acute ability to detect subtle signs of infection in others.

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