Ants: Who looks after the injured in a colony?
uni-wuerzburg.de59 points by hhs 5 days ago
59 points by hhs 5 days ago
> 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.
They can look altruistic at the individual level while still being completely aligned with self-preservation at the group level
Ants are also a special case because the vast majority of ants cannot reproduce. Only the queen and drones are reproductive agents, 99.9 percent of the colony are non reproductive, so their investment in the survival of the colony is total, they have no individual agenda.
Which shows the anti-vaxxer idiot herd is even more of a plague on society than they think. It does not only increase the risk for themselves (which alone increases the downstream burden on the healthcare system), it also increases risks and harm to the rest of society.
They are literally more stupid than ants, who willingly prophylactically amputate limbs to minimize risk to themselves and their neighbors.
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.
Some ants isolate themselves when they are close to death, which prevents infectious diseases from wiping out the entire colony. [1]
I think in this case forcibly ejecting the injured ant could lead to more injuries of otherwise healthy ants.
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...
> I’m surprised they don’t just eject the injured worker from the colony
Wonder if this has something to do due with space constraints. If the study was done in a controlled nest, it must be space bounded one way or another. Dynamics might change when in real-world?
That could imply that maybe ants have some sort of disability benefits for those who have lost limbs.
I'm going to hazard a speculative answer with poor evidence: love.
The ants love one another, as shown by their child-rearing, grooming, playing, the "antennating" mentioned in the article, collective defense, and deliberate handling of their dead.
We don't understand their language, but I have a certain faith that ants experience a very similar kinship for their sisters as we. If they were strictly-rational robots then why would they show these behaviors?
While I concede it's possible the ants in some sense love each other. I suspect that it's actually net beneficial. Each ant has a certain cost to manufacture for the colony, a damaged ant is better than no ant, they're not rehabilitating ants who will never be productive again, these ants lost (part of) one limb, and with it removed they are disabled but still productive for the colony and at low risk of introducing infections.
I remember when I was much younger I got cancer. The same cancer Hank Green had more recently if you want a relateable celebrity example. It's fixable, and I live in a country with universal healthcare, so of course they fixed it. Even if you care only about simple economics that's a sound investment. I was already a massive net cost, needing feeding and care for decades before I became an adult able to do something useful and then almost immediately (in fact, technically before getting my first "real" job) getting cancer. If you do nothing the cancer kills me, we can't prove it's fatal because we figured out how to cure it† before modern scientific medicine and it would be unethical to study that on real volunteers now, but we can observe that crazy people who insist "No" when offered a cure today do die, horribly, as you'd expect if it's deadly.
But under universal healthcare of course you fix people like me, we become ordinary productive citizens and contribute to society including by paying some eyewatering amount of taxes over the subsequent years, which helps pay for said universal healthcare.
Many cases aren't like mine, but we forget that quite a lot are, and without universal healthcare you are net losing money so as to hurt poor people which is full-on "Capitalism is a death cult" insanity.
† Some people will tell you cancer can't be "cured". Well, OK, the doctors who treated me do this all day every day, they'd never had a young man die of this cancer. They'd had some close calls, some old men die of this cancer, and they'd had plenty of young men die from other cancers under their care, but this one, nope. There are technical reasons, but they're boring and Hank Green probably made a better video explaining them than I could.
I mean that is an untestable claim right? Like we can only infer from their behavior and there is no absolute way to really understand what consiousness is and how other species experience it. So while yes they may love each other but love is a very complex emotion with specific meaning while what they do is more reactive actions that keep the herd safe instead of subjective affection. It is highly unlikely ants are capable of complex emotions given their nervous system design
So the colony's "medical staff" are basically the people between jobs who happen to know everyone
Surgery, antimicrobials, farming crops, animal husbandry... humans are late to the game.
Related video? "Cordyceps: attack of the killer fungi - Planet Earth Attenborough BBC wildlife" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8 (2008)
If you're interested in ants (and even if you're not) I highly recommend the book Journey to the Ants by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson.
Never heard of that book, thanks for the recommendation. I always found Mark Moffetts talks/interviews/books interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60-iFyfjRo0
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.
Fascinating. Hidden on the bottom of the article seems to be a video [1] showcasing how they track each ant out of the six colonies of 110 each.
I'd like to read the paper to skim over the methodology but it's not open-access :(
[1] https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/fileadmin/uniwue/2026/0702Ameis...
And the injured ant just sits there and takes it, probably in pain, because I'm guessing it also knows that it's best for the colony. Fascinating.
Fascinating stuff, I wonder if nature is reusing the "care" neuro-circuitry or if it's some other mechanism. Brood care and fellow care seem to be related by that thread. Would love to see those ants fMRIs at each stage.
we need to mimmick this behaviour in a drone swarm, as well as the reverse, bringing a replacement and reattaching.