Ants recognise infected wounds and treat them with antibiotics

https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/ant-antibiotics/

by hhs • 3 years ago

469 163 3 years ago

uni-wuerzburg.de

jandrese2• 3 years ago

Or as they call them "ibiotics".

leesec• 3 years ago

Nice

dataflow2• 3 years ago

Took me a good minute to figure this out, I kept thinking it was some kind of anti-Apple joke I wasn't understanding.

jamala1• 3 years ago

Is the joke removing the "ant" prefix?

xenospn• 3 years ago

Thy probably teach this in ropology class.

orliesaurus• 3 years ago

this is an iquate joke

withants• 3 years ago

with ants

duluca• 3 years ago

Came here for this as soon as I read the headline. Satisfied!

bch• 3 years ago

Thanks ants. Thants.

Razengan• 3 years ago

What is HN coming to

ozfive2• 3 years ago

Dang does an amazing job of moderating but I am sure it's near impossible to keep up at this point. At least the overly political article submissions aren't making it through. I've been reprimanded and have learned the error of my ways in comments. Sometimes people just need the reminder. No matter what you are going through in life it's not ok to take it out on others.

thinkingemote• 3 years ago

I also assumed the same, so I looked back in time. If you read some of the early HN posts, the quality, length, variety is the same as is now. (length seems longer now).

There's even a bunch of "what did this site become" comments from way back too!

I think it's we who change, we mature, grow older, more grumpy or less grumpy.

whutsurnaym• 3 years ago

And if that doesn't work, their immune systems fight off infection using "ibodies"

nerpderp82• 3 years ago

If the wounds become infected, there is a significant survival risk. However, Matabele ants have developed a sophisticated healthcare system: they can distinguish between non-infected and infected wounds and treat the latter efficiently with antibiotics they produce themselves.

eigenket8• 3 years ago

That's insanely impressive and almost scary level of adaptation/smart behaviour from the ants.

Edit: it feels more like something you'd read from Adrian Czajkowski/Tchaikovsky rather than reality.

ilrwbwrkhv• 3 years ago

90% reduction in mortality. Wow.

20after46• 3 years ago

Have you seen what else ants can do? They are full of insanely impressive/scary/smart behaviors.

Ants farm aphids. They don't just find aphids and collect their "honeydew" excretions. They actually bring the aphids to the plants and then tend to them.

Ants harvest the sunflower seeds from my sunflowers. Not just some of the seeds. If I leave the flowers even one day past the time to harvest those seeds, the ants get every single seed. They do it by having some ants up on the flower popping out the seeds, and more ants down below collecting them off the ground. That's some incredible coordination. And these are tiny ants, not some big powerful ants. It's mind boggling to think any creature is able to pull it off. I'm honestly surprised they don't have megalithic structures built of huge stones. Though their underground colonies are megalithic in scale compared to the ants.

Maybe instead of ancient aliens we should look into ants as the actual builders of the pyramids.

eigenket8• 3 years ago

I've seen and heard a lot of what they can do, but certainly not everything. Pretty sure humanity as a whole is very far from understanding everything ants do and why.

bloopernova2• 3 years ago

Ants can pass the mirror test too, which only a very select few mammals/birds have passed.

https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/04/15/list-of-animals-t...

ants_everywhere• 3 years ago

Ants really are incredible.

Not only do they farm aphids, they also farm fungus. Leafcutter ants bring the leaves to their fungus farm. Then they eat the fungus.

So ants farm both livestock and crops.

They also form super colonies.

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 years ago

There was an episode of Cosmos[0], where Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about bees, and shows how they are actually a hive intelligence that could be compared to us.

Ants have a similar hivemind.

It was pretty awesome.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubE9hjrsHmI

pharrington• 3 years ago

Ants have been doing the whole "advanced civilization" before long before humans even evolved. There's a ton of stuff we still have to learn about, and from, them.

edit - didn't see eigenket's comment basically saying the same thing

sillywalk• 3 years ago

Ants farm aphids

and also fungus

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-ants-becam...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-leafcutter-ants-...

BelleOfTheBall• 3 years ago

I'm amused that people call ants doing pretty human behavioral quirks "scary". Obviously the implication is that they're smarter than we knew, but I'm giggling imagining some other species going "Have you seen what humans can do?" and then just describing the beef industry, Boston Dynamics robot dogs or Facebook.

ycombinete2• 3 years ago

I would love to see a timelapse of them harvesting the sunflowers, that is absolutely incredible.

eurekin2• 3 years ago

I'm especially surprised a tiny milligram worth of brain is able to provide such high level functions and coordination. I'd normally expect all those neurons would be occupied fully with processing visual stimuli, smells and coordination limb movement alone.

luqtas• 3 years ago

they also have a really organized division of labor, like "some wait at the nest for some days, then after the ones who went out get tired, the resting ones assume their positions etc."

https://antsauthority.com :D

bayindirh• 3 years ago

Assuming only the humans have certain traits or level of intelligence/knowledge in some areas of life becomes a more foolish act as we discover what other living things are capable of.

I, for one, welcome our ant overlords.

Voultapher• 3 years ago

One could call it a human suprematist mindset.

atticora• 3 years ago

That's insanely impressive and almost scary level of adaptation

I fully agree while thinking the same thing about our immune system behavior. The insanely scary impressive thing is that this level of adaptation is the rule not the anomaly in biological systems.

janandonly• 3 years ago

I'm surprised I don't have nightmares from his book with the planner filled with ants that are elevated to intelligence

JoBrad• 3 years ago

I think the ants are still used as mostly dumb workers.

SCM-Enthusiast4• 3 years ago

with fire!

kromem2• 3 years ago

They also seem to pass the mirror test:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9881685/#:~:tex....

kromem2• 3 years ago

Link to the PDF of the research itself for those interested:

https://www.journalofscience.net/showpdf/MjY4a2FsYWkxNDc4NTI...

gwill• 3 years ago

For treatment, they then apply antimicrobial compounds and proteins to the infected wounds. They take these antibiotics from the metapleural gland, which is located on the side of their thorax. Its secretion contains 112 components, half of which have an antimicrobial or wound-healing effect

I was curious about this metapleural gland and found this article on its uses: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21504532/#:~:text=The%20meta....

soperj• 3 years ago

Gotta wonder what the other 56 components do, and if we're using them for anything?

Bluescreenbuddy• 3 years ago

A wound for ants

justinl332• 3 years ago

conspecific: a member of the same species.

boznz• 3 years ago

I am in a constant battle with ants in my kitchen, they are tenacious little buggers and the only way that really works is to keep the kitchen immaculately clean!

ethbr12• 3 years ago

Plot twist: ants just aesthetically prefer tidiness and so engineered your behavior to ensure a clean kitchen.

ace2358• 3 years ago

Would read that sci-fi

jxy• 3 years ago

Now that I think of this, they probably hired mice and cockroaches, too.

coding123• 3 years ago

Best way is to kill them and not clean up the bodies. They smell like mint usually. Keeps them away

powersnail3• 3 years ago

My experience with ants (at least with common small black ants) is that they tend to eventually remove the dead body after some poking around, rather than keep away from the crime scene.

qiqitori• 3 years ago

I've had excellent results with ant bait containing hydramethylnon. Just placed a couple bait containers in the room I had them; they were gone the next day and it's been almost three years.

Joel_Mckay3• 3 years ago

I live in an area where Monomorium pharaonis is an invasive species, and there are many fruit trees in our city (mostly varieties of cherry and plum).

Leave this Mixture in a shallow lid/dish next to the Ant entry point:

1 part borax dish soap

3 parts granulated sugar

15 parts warm water

They will ingest the mixture, and return the payload to the colony if dilute enough. A few days later the slow poison should start to knock out the group.

Indeed, once a path is chemically marked it is very hard to keep ants out, and failure to remove a waste bin lures them in again.

Mixing kiln dried diatomaceous earth with water for treating the surrounding external structure also helps knock down anything with a chitin exoskeleton. It can be effective if a colony has attached to a tunnel system.

Best of luck =)

progman32• 3 years ago

Three other options (admittedly less effective, but the upside is no killing).

1. Give them what they want. I have a bottle of cheap corn syrup I use as a truce offering. If I start getting scouts or the beginnings of an incursion I just dump a big glob of the syrup right next to their nest outside. Everyone disappears from my house within a half hour. Usually, they forget about the kitchen for a couple weeks. Then I repeat.

2. Peppermint oil. The ants here will avoid it. If I smear it across an active ant line it interrupts it even.

3. Ant moat. Works great for sugar products and pet dishes. I use 4 shot glasses full of soapy water holding up a small kitchen rack. The rack is perched on 4 small submerged pillars I added to the rack's feet.

Edit: of course an invasive species needs to be dealt with in accordance to the threat to the local ecosystem. I'm just providing options for simple nuisance ants.

throwanem2• 3 years ago

once a path is chemically marked it is very hard to keep ants out

Nonsense. A wipe with plain white vinegar suffices to dissolve the pheromone trail, and seems to deter foragers for some while after.

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

only way that really works is to keep the kitchen immaculately clean

Prevention better than cure, as always :-).

lukas099• 3 years ago

They're helping you find spots you missed.

powersnail3• 3 years ago

Sadly that's not always effective. My house is immaculately clean, no food residue for ants to find, but they still come......for water!

They get into toilet tank, cat's water bowl, flower vase, my cup, looking for nothing but water. Not once had I seen them moving any sort of food in my house, (they also doesn't seem to be interested in cat food), but they always manage to find water. I wonder how they manage such a low calorie diet.

It took quite a bit of effort to caulk every one of their entrance; which seems to be the most effective measure so far.

lupusreal• 3 years ago

Leave a water bowl outside for them maybe?

nickjj3• 3 years ago

I watched a video once on YouTube about ants and there was a section where they encountered termites and had an all out battle.

The termite warriors would literally bite off the ant's limbs in 1 quick bite.

They mentioned the antibiotics allowed ants to resume basic functionality within a day. Imagine losing your arm at 9am and then still be useful by 3pm with no more than a few seconds or a minute of someone giving you antibiotics. We're not talking about regeneration here, but walking around and acting as normal as you can be given your missing limb(s).

judge2020• 3 years ago

We're not talking about regeneration here

That's reserved for the Axolotl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl#Regeneration

ericpruitt• 3 years ago

I watched a video once on YouTube about ants and there was a section where they encountered termites and had an all out battle.

Do you have a link?

jprete• 3 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Megaponera+anal...

The top one ("Megaponera analis - termite predators of the african savannah") was decent although the accent was hard for me to understand. It's definitely not the video the GP referenced, though, because the narrator doesn't mention the wound treatment or antibiotics, just that the injured ants are carried home.

nickjj3• 3 years ago

Do you have a link?

Unfortunately no. It was probably about a year ago and searching around for "ants" videos isn't coming up with anything. I've noticed that after a while YouTube will remove the red border to indicate you've watched a video.

I can say for sure it wasn't a Kurzgesagt video, but they have a number of videos about ants. I haven't seen all of them but their videos are usually high quality: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Kurzgesagt+ants

The video I'm thinking about had pretty big black "warrior" ants scout out an area and engage with termites, I'm not sure of their species. Based on my memory it felt like a documentary style video. It was all live captured video with a narrator, not an animation.

To be honest I'm not super into ants. It was one of those videos that somehow landed in my feed and I was pleasantly surprised because I like learning about new things.

buryat• 3 years ago

i found a video of a standoff between termites and ants even more impressive: https://youtu.be/C96w-7B2W8I

nixass2• 3 years ago

Check "Life on our planet" on Netflix. It's about dinosaurs but also has plenty of bits around evolution. In one episode they talk about ants vs termites and also focus on that particular bit (limbs getting damaged or ripped off)

https://www.netflix.com/title/80213846?preventIntent=true

Also, visually very impressive documentary

sva_2• 3 years ago

Consider crabs amputating their own limbs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v241TF-cSzU

gumby• 3 years ago

Humans do it too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aron_Ralston

pvaldes• 3 years ago

Is different. Crabs or Spiders can regrow a limb amputated, but adult insects can't.

spike0212• 3 years ago

I'm sure it's unrelated but this reminds me of my dog. If I ever have a paper cut or like dry skin on my hands from eczema, as soon as he sniffs the cut or damaged skin he tries to keep licking them like he's... cleaning them out or something? He's my first dog so I haven't really looked into why dogs do that.

Of course I wash my hands with soap very well after he does that since he obviously has many germs.

Just find that very interesting.

tiltowait• 3 years ago

Yep, that's why dogs do that. The term "licking your wounds" comes from that behavior (which many animals do).

sva_2• 3 years ago

Wolves do that as well.

shiroiuma2• 3 years ago

If I ever have a paper cut or like dry skin on my hands from eczema, as soon as he sniffs the cut or damaged skin he tries to keep licking them like he's... cleaning them out or something? He's my first dog so I haven't really looked into why dogs do that.

If it were an injury on the dog, it's very helpful for preventing infection.

However, because it's on you, it's a good way for you to get an infection and need your limbs amputated.

https://people.com/human-interest/man-who-lost-arms-legs-nos...

spike0212• 3 years ago

Yeah, like I said, I wash very well after! Also I wouldn't let him do it on a deep cut/laceration. it's just like cracked skin and whatnot at worst.

mr_toad2• 3 years ago

Saliva can clean the wound and contains anti microbial agents and white blood cells.

Madmallard• 3 years ago

distributed cognition is a really bizarre thing that we need to learn more about

turns out problem solving and intelligence don't have to be localized at all and even not having them localized doesn't necessarily hinder the ability for it to handle complex problems either

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

How is a self-created antibiotic different from a T-cell or antibody?

melagonster2• 3 years ago

T-cell is a type of cell. they can move and work. antibodies are small proteins generated by cell. usually, antibodies binding to something and help immune system work. antibiotics are some molecules we can add it into our body and only kill pathogens.

so they are different terms. in another way, if the molecules will be used as drug, it probably call antibiotic.

mr_toad2• 3 years ago

Antibiotics are just simple chemicals that kill bacteria - with the caveat that they preferably don’t also kill the patient.

sethbannon• 3 years ago

Amazing. Also neat that we may actually learn to treat human infections better after this discovery.

"Erik Frank. Laurent Keller also adds that these findings 'have medical implications because the primary pathogen in ant’s wounds, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, is also a leading cause of infection in humans, with several strains being resistant to antibiotics'."

Love imagining leading scientists from big pharma rushing to investigate the compound cocktails ants are using to make the next blockbuster drug.

danielheath• 3 years ago

And here I thought their anty bodies were enough to fight disease.

Xeamek• 3 years ago

What?

HaZeust• 3 years ago

Nice.

vibrio2• 3 years ago

This is a pedantic note, but in general Pharma does not care about antibiotics drug development - It’s an economic desert. If it was a cancer or serious rare disease drug, they’d be grinding up buckets of ants yesterday.

RmTheGame• 3 years ago

Well rare disease is also an economic desert. Its only because of Government regulation big pharma started to care about these.

Mainly the Orphan Drug Act of 1983 with provided tax incentives as well as subsidized research. There is also the Rare Disease act of 2002 but that IMO is less signifigant.

Don't forget that for rare diseases affecting children the government awards fast track vouchers. These allow you to shorten the approval time of another drug (or sell it for a few hundred million for another company to do the same.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Drug_Act_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Diseases_Act_of_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_review

axsl• 3 years ago

super interesting!

luxuryballs• 3 years ago

I hope those ants have a valid government approved doctor’s prescription for that

rvba• 3 years ago

What will happen?

Some pharma company will vopy the antibiotic.

Farmers will give it like candy to animals and in third world countries they will dump it to rivers.

Bacterias get resistant. So the antibiotic becomes useless for humans and then ants stsrt to die off.

whycome2• 3 years ago

Ants are like a real-life machine learning model.

shostack• 3 years ago

Read Children of Time and have your mind blown.

whycome2• 3 years ago

Thanks for the rec! That seems right up my alley!

Re: ants. A quick google suggests there could be around twenty quadrillion ants on earth. With such volume, they could literally "learn" through pure trial and error like a machine learning model.

kaitocross• 3 years ago

Does that mean that Ants have a better healthcare system than the USA?

bantunes• 3 years ago

Pretty low bar to clear, isn't it?

melagonster2• 3 years ago

To be frank, providing free treatment for limb fractures is quite demanding in terms of standards

treprinum• 3 years ago

"With the exception of humans, I know of no other living creature that can carry out such sophisticated medical wound treatments," - aren't cats/dogs doing the same by licking their wounds, applying ample amounts of lactoferrin that is a potent antibacterial/antiviral substance?

baz00• 3 years ago

Well if it's like my cat, it licked its butt beforehand and cost me vet bills a couple of times so YMMV.

treme• 3 years ago

and we only learned to wash hands 130 years ago

rq1• 3 years ago

I hope ants won't end up copyrighted.

a_gnostic• 3 years ago

Time to stop preaching about eating insects, and start offering them equal rights! I, for one, will not participate in the insect holocaust, and will embrace their mesosoma in friendship.

SCM-Enthusiast4• 3 years ago

They take these antibiotics from the metapleural gland

The fact that a gland could arise through natural selection makes over 112 different components from anti-biotics to chemicals blows my mind.

The underlying theory that "random mutation" and errors in the copying of ant DNA created a secretion sac is crazy to me. I imagine this first ant was like the "Mule" in foundation, where he could introduce chemicals to "Control and conquer". There seems to be some underlying learning mechanism built within "Random mutation".

InSteady• 3 years ago

Heck yeah, evolution is mind-blowing sometimes. Ok, most of the time. However, as a layperson, I often find that things aren't so random and almost unbelievable as they seem at first glance when you start having more context and pieces to fit together.

It appears that we have long known that ants, like humans, have microbiomes that produce myriad antimicrobial and antibiotic compounds (and other bioactive molecules) which they are able to make use of. [1] In this paper it sounds like there are other glands that also store and secrete these antimicrobial compounds.

So both mechanisms -- antimicrobial compounds from the microbiome and storage/secretion in glands -- most likely existed prior to the development of this specialized metapleural gland. This specific gland is used very frequently in grooming behavior. When they groom themselves, each other, the queen and larva (and even their fungal colonies in the case of leafcutters), they may massage their metaleural gland prior to this grooming to apply antimicrobials/antibiotics and reduce risk of infection. Presumably grooming behavior existed prior to this gland as well, and almost certainly involved secretions from other glands (saliva or the ant equivalent comes to mind), especially to 'clean off' old pheromones as well as crud that would interrupt signaling.

So we have pretty much all the ingredients independently for this rather specialized organ + behavior (*this is a narrative constructed via layperson reading and speculation, not in any way intended to be presented as scientific fact).

Also, I'm no biologist (let alone evolution/genetics specialist), but what I understand and what makes the most sense to me is that evolution is no longer strictly believed to occur solely on the basis of random mutations. For instance, we have a lot of evidence in very specific cases that epigenetic changes can occur in response to the environment as well as internal processes, and that these changes can be inherited and become a permanent part of the genome by various proposed mechanisms:

There is now good evidence that epigenetic inheritance is ubiquitous and is involved in adaptive evolution and macroevolution. I argue that the many evolutionary consequences of epigenetic inheritance open up new research areas and require the extension of the evolutionary synthesis beyond the current neo-Darwinian model.

The abstract of another paper goes into more detail on how epigenetics may directly and indirectly influence evolution, if you are interested. It's mostly over my head beyond the broad strokes. [3]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1634922/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5566804/

[3] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.011...

e3a8• 3 years ago

Ants do other amazing stuff too. E.g. they break seeds into two halves when storing so the seeds don't germinate. They also know that Coriander seeds germinate even when split into two so they split it into four parts.

Ants recognise infected wounds and treat them with antibiotics

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