Ants: Who Looks After the Injured in a Colony?
I explore the surprising discovery that injured ants in a colony receive dedicated care from their peers. This research reveals a complex social behavior where healthy workers actively assist their wounded companions, challenging our understanding of insect empathy and collective survival strategies.
The injured ants do not simply wait to die; they are actively cared for by their colony members, highlighting a profound level of social cooperation.
- Frieren
> The ants carry out prophylactic amputations. This not only protects the colony from infection but also doubles the survival rate of the injured workers.
To keep everybody around you healthy makes the probability of caching a disease lower for yourself, too.
Grooming behaviour in primates helps in the same way. And it is so important that it is linked to all kinds of mental rewards.
To let disease run amok in your own neighborhood it would be very costly.
- Ouman
So the colony's "medical staff" are basically the people between jobs who happen to know everyone
- kdavis
Surgery, antimicrobials, farming crops, animal husbandry... humans are late to the game.
- afavour
I’m surprised they don’t just eject the injured worker from the colony. I wonder if there are specific tasks the amputated ant then goes on to do, or if they resume their former duties at a lower speed.
- mallomarmeasle
That is super cool. Unfortunately I cannot access the original article to see the methodology, but they mention using a system that can track individual ants in a colony of ~100.
I wonder what kind of biometrics allow that. The ants do not seem to be tagged individually in the linked video: https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/fileadmin/uniwue/2026/0702Ameis...
Not to be too speciesist, but the ants kind of all look the same to me.