Bee Expert Sheds Light on Insects’ Self-Medication

Bee Expert Sheds Light on Insects’ Self-Medication

Associate Professor Michael Lattorff in UKZN’s School of Life Sciences is the senior author of an open-access paper published in the journal Trends in Parasitology that reviews how insect behaviour and the collection of medicinal food helps them cure themselves or their family members of disease, the interaction of medicinal food and the immune system and microbiome, and the costs of medication.

Titled Insects’ Essential Role in Understanding and Broadening Animal Medication, the paper was authored by Lattorff and seven scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Austria. The review was inspired by a symposium on self-medication in insects that Lattorff hosted during the International Congress of Entomology in 2022, where speakers discussed how bees, ants, and butterflies utilise medicinal food.

Identifying a gap in the research on self-medication in insects, with the last papers on the topic published over a decade ago, the researchers collaborated on an updated review of how insects have advanced the understanding of self-medication.

Lattorff explained that self-medication was first observed and described in chimpanzees. In animals, it is defined as the consumption or application of an external species prompted by the presence of a pathogenic, parasitic infection, which enhances the fitness of the affected individual or its relatives. Self-medication would be costly for the uninfected individual, but the behaviour is appropriate in the natural environment.

Many medications were developed drawing on millennia of human observation of animals’ use of substances in their environments to treat their ailments or ward off illness, and insects present another frontier for understanding these phenomena given their suitability for field and laboratory experimentation and their varied developmental stages, behaviours, and ecological interactions.

Lattorff and his colleagues tackled the challenge of unearthing which points of insect self-medication were addressed within the past decade and the kind of knowledge and research gaps that still exist. They outlined the knowledge, predictions, and gaps to be closed for self-medication research in social insects, and, for the first time, summarised the microbiome’s contribution to self-medication and provided guidance for future research.

They also provided a glossary of terms and guidance for studying self-medication behaviour including factors to be considered and criteria to be measured, highlighting potential problems that might occur.

Their framework specifically covered social insects that also engage in behaviour to protect or treat their relatives and demonstrated the conditions that are necessary for the evolution of kin medication as well as how natural microbiota might play a role in self-medication.

Lattorff joined UKZN in February 2024 after working at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) in Kenya for five years. Originally from Germany, he studied zoology, genetics, botany, and palaeontology at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, where during his fourth year, Professor Robin Moritz sparked his interest in novel research on bees. He pursued his diploma and PhD studies under Moritz’s supervision, with this research focusing on South African honeybees, specifically a subspecies of the honeybee endemic to the Western Cape. He conducted experiments at Rhodes University and collaborated with the University of Pretoria in his studies on the genetic basis of a set of traits related to the reproduction of workers, which are usually sterile but in the Cape honeybee can reproduce, even in the presence of the queen, producing only female offspring parthenogenetically, essentially cloning themselves.

Lattorff led a junior research group at his alma mater and in 2013 attained a Habilitation degree in Zoology, enabling him to become a professor. He took up an interim professorship for Animal Physiology at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg for two years before joining icipe, where he led the bee research group and was a visiting professor at the University of Nairobi, studying the pollination of avocados, bee health, and bee products and their effect on bee health.

Lattorff looks forward to incorporating teaching and research in his role at UKZN, and will continue to work on bees, focusing on parasites and diseases.

Words: Christine Cuénod

Photograph: Michael Lattorff