Ants: Who looks after the injured in a colony?

https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/ameisen-kolonie-verletzte-pflegt/

by hhs • 19 days ago

116 51 19 days ago

rolph• 19 days ago

we need to mimmick this behaviour in a drone swarm, as well as the reverse, bringing a replacement and reattaching.

khalic2• 15 days ago

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.

card_zero• 14 days ago

Isn't fMRI resolution similar in size to 1 ant?

khalic2• 14 days ago

You can have sub 0.1mm resolution with specialised coils

Frieren• 15 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.

Ouman2• 15 days ago

They can look altruistic at the individual level while still being completely aligned with self-preservation at the group level

K0balt• 14 days ago

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.

pfannkuchen• 14 days ago

*gene level

mftb• 14 days ago

Thank you for saying this. I've been saying this for years. No one listens.

nchmy3• 14 days ago

may i ask in what context youve been saying this? I suspect it aint ant colonies...

Ouman2• 15 days ago

So the colony's "medical staff" are basically the people between jobs who happen to know everyone

myrmidon• 14 days ago

Just like a medieval barber surgeon.

yubblegum• 14 days ago

I just had a flashback to Eastwood's Hang 'Em High.

ahahs4• 14 days ago

flashback to the dr barber from misadventures of flapjack

afavour2• 15 days ago

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.

ggcr2• 14 days ago

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?

deadbabe• 14 days ago

That could imply that maybe ants have some sort of disability benefits for those who have lost limbs.

altmanaltman3• 14 days ago

VA NT

BuyMyBitcoins• 14 days ago

“maybe ants have some sort of disability benefit”

Eusocial Security?

wjholden• 14 days ago

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?

tialaramex• 14 days ago

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.

altmanaltman3• 14 days ago

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

sk65• 14 days ago

Well ants have outlived the chimp troupe and its over rated intelligence by 200 million years.

So there are serious people who think if the chimps(or any social species for that matter) ever survive 200 million years borrowing ant like behavior at individual and group level is a possible way.

ahahs4• 14 days ago

All beings have emotions and feel things. Especially love. It is not a specifically human thing to form attachments, have bonds, and share community.

dubbel• 14 days ago

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...

ggcr2• 15 days ago

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...

kdavis• 14 days ago

Surgery, antimicrobials, farming crops, animal husbandry... humans are late to the game.

snarf21• 14 days ago

Yeah, wood ants are particularly prolific in these areas. They are quite amazing creatures.

mallomarmeasle• 14 days ago

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.

mmooss2• 14 days ago

I was wondering about the same thing. From the OP:

"... the team examined six colonies, each comprising 110 ants .... Using a fully automated tracking system, the researchers were able to precisely monitor the movements and hundreds of thousands of interactions of each ant, as well as their wound care, over a period of weeks."

I wonder about the background of that software - how does it work, who developed it, how much does it cost, how much data does it output? It's applications are profound, including for human privacy, but I think I already knew about its use there.

downwithbgp• 14 days ago

You don't need access to the paper, their methodology is explained in the SI: https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2614400123/suppl...

benjaminard• 14 days ago

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.

SoftTalker• 14 days ago

I am doubtful that ants feel conscious pain.

ahahs4• 14 days ago

What proof do you have? I think you're wrong. They do feel pain but know what they are doing is a net positive. Sort of how civil war injuries resulted in amputations. A lot of amputees back then definitely felt pain.

felineflock• 14 days ago

Until the 80s, many medical professionals believed infants could not feel pain due to an underdeveloped nervous system and performed major invasive surgeries in babies without anesthesia. Doctors sometimes used paralytic agents to keep the infant completely still instead of pain relievers. It was horrifying when I found out about that.

merryocha• 14 days ago

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.

yuppiepuppie• 14 days ago

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

mmooss2• 14 days ago

FWIW, The Ants by Holldobler & Wilson is a famous book, afaik the leading book in its field.

HelloUsername• 14 days ago

Related video? "Cordyceps: attack of the killer fungi - Planet Earth Attenborough BBC wildlife" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8 (2008)

robotnikman• 14 days ago

I wonder if Bees also show similar behavior

Ants: Who looks after the injured in a colony?

Related Stories