How to Stay Healthy With Zero Social Distancing: Study the Bee
An ecologist says humans can learn a lot from nature about staying safe
A major risk factor for Covid-19 is crowding, whether at home, work, or elsewhere. And it’s not just Covid. Any communicable disease spreads faster in crowds. So how is it that bees, ants, and termites, which climb all over each other in super-crowded colonies, manage to stay so healthy? What can we learn from them to protect ourselves?
Ruth DeFries has your answer in her book What Would Nature Do: A Guide for Our Uncertain Times, published in December. The Columbia University professor of ecology and sustainable development finds solutions in nature that can be applied to human ills ranging from stock market crashes to water shortages to internet outages like the one that hit the U.S. East Coast on Jan. 26.