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.
“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.