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.

There isn’t one single trick that bees, ants, and termites use to keep their hives and nests safe. If there were, pathogens probably would have evolved a way around it by now. There are multiple defenses—many of which could be, and in some cases have been, adopted by human beings. Dying insects separate themselves. Dead ones are dragged away. Healthy members pick spores and mites off their sick nestmates. (Not 100% effective, to be sure: see Varroa mites.)

“Garden ants secrete a disinfectant and spread it on their nests,” DeFries writes. “Termites spread their own feces in their nests to benefit from its antimicrobial properties.” Maybe we can skip that one.

What’s more, there’s less random mingling among social insects than you might think. The individuals that are the most exposed to risk—because they forage for food and guard against predators--live on the periphery. Those that carry out waste live together at a distance from others. If a pathogen does break through the defenses, DeFries writes, “Those who acquired immunity through low-dose exposure to the pathogen as they cared for the sick form a protective wall around the queen.” 

Nature has evolved a solution to network architecture questions that people are still grappling with. If a disease hasn’t spread far, the most efficient solution is to isolate the sick. If the disease has spread too far for that, the fallback is to isolate the healthy but vulnerable. Inoculating health-care and nursing home workers first is all about forming a protective wall around patients.  Unlike insects, DeFries writes, “our species is still learning how to manage.”

DeFries breaks down the lessons from nature into four categories: self-correcting features; diversity; defenses against cascading failure in networks; and “bottom-up knowledge.” On the last one, she credits Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist who in 2009 became the first woman to win a Nobel prize in economics, contrasting her approach with that of Garrett Hardin, the ecologist who warned of overpopulation.

Hardin was so sure that the “tragedy of the commons” would lead to overexploitation of resources that he advocated draconian measures to control the human population, on up to mandatory sterilization of parents after one child. Ostrom recoiled at that, DeFries writes, and discovered in traveling the world that multiple societies had worked out ways to prevent overexploitation of resources without dictates from centralized governments. Aquifers in California and forests in Nepal, for example.

Ideas for people fill the same role that genes play for less intelligent creatures, DeFries says. If bees work together smoothly without any instructions from the queen bee because they’re genetically programmed to do so, then people should be able to work together smoothly without instructions from the government because they have ideas for how to do so, she suggests.

Decentralized cooperation is not always going to work (as even Ostrom was quick to say) but it’s a good aspiration. Meanwhile, about those termite feces ….