Giving Compass' Take:

• Charlie Durant and Rob Hammond explain how humans could learn from ants in order to inform our antimicrobial resistance efforts. 

• How can funders support research into antimicrobial resistance? 

• Learn how to fund and fund scientific research. 

The world is facing an antibiotics crisis. Due to overuse, many once-powerful drugs are now useless against certain strains of serious bacterial infections. So scientists are on the hunt for new ways to attack harmful microbes.

One possibility is to investigate how other species have evolved ways to defend themselves. A new study highlights how most ants, even from small colonies, produce antimicrobial chemicals in their bodily secretions. It also suggests those ants that don’t make these substances are likely to have some other method of controlling bacteria that could be investigated. So perhaps the answer to antibiotic resistance is under our feet.

Like humans, the more than 12,000 species of ants are all highly social. This behaviour increases the chance that they come into to contact with germs. Comparable to our towns and cities, ant colonies take communal living to the next level, with up to tens of millions of individuals cohabiting in a single nest.

Read more about antibiotic resistance by Charlie Durant and Rob Hammond at The Conversation.