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Ants: Who looks after the injured in a colony?
- rolph 3mo agowe need to mimmick this behaviour in a drone swarm, as well as the reverse, bringing a replacement and reattaching.
- khalic 3mo agoFascinating 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.
- Frieren 3mo 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.
- Ouman 3mo agoThey can look altruistic at the individual level while still being completely aligned with self-preservation at the group level
- K0balt 3mo agoAnts 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.
- makeitdouble 3mo agoAs I understand it, the individual vs the group situation is complicated by their shared genetic pool. I'd imagine it as having dozens of clones of myself, and one of them is tasked with reproducing for the rest of us. It sounds like a total lack of individualism, but if the offspring has my genes and is raised like me (potentially by me), how far is it from being my own ?
- jayGlow 3mo agoeusocial animals are really cool you can kinda treat the entire colony as a single organism. weirdly enough this isn't restricted to insects there are actually some eusocial mammals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality the book coalescent by Stephen Baxter is an interesting take on what that might look like in humans as well if you're interested in the topic.
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- pfannkuchen 3mo ago*gene level
- fp_hub 3mo ago[dead]
- toss1 3mo ago[flagged]
- SoftTalker 3mo agoLots of people do lots of things that increase the downstream burden on the healthcare system, including being obese, sedentary, driving cars, having a poor diet, engaging in substance abuse, contact sports, skydiving, rock climbing, etc.
- toss1 3mo agoNo, those three things are NOT the same. Exactly zero of those things you list also spread disease throughout the population, and are aggressively anti-science. They only arguably affect the person themselves and the overall HC costs. Moreover, for the active items you listed: driving, contact sports, skydiving, rock climbing, etc., nearly everyone doing them takes real precautions to minimize the health risks — their motivation is to continue doing the event, not to get injuries which would prevent them enjoying their activity. In the passive harms you mentioned, the people are passive, not active. No one intentionally becomes obese or sedentary or ruins their diet; they simply fail to have the motivation or to learn the knowledge required to do better (or they have actual conditions that prevent them from doing so). There is nothing intentional about it. In contrast, the anti-science anti-vaxxers willfully maintain and aggressively spread their ignorance and impose their ignorant bad decisions as costs on society and increased health risks for everyone. The anti-vaxxers are doing the opposite of taking safety-measures to improve health and safety of their activities — instead, they actively evade free, safe, and effective health and public health measures. The anti-vaxxers are doing the opposite of passively failing to maintain their health — instead they actively deny science, medicine, and public health issues, and actively evade recommendations or mandates. As the study illustrated, they are literally more stupid and anti-society than ants. They freeload off the health care system and herd immunity built and maintained by their smarter peers.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoDriving alone kills far more people every year than disease spread by anti-vaxxers. And injuries from driving are seen in emergency rooms every day. I'm not defending anti-vaxxers. But they are not a big problem. And you can get vaccinated yourself and worry even less.
- mftb 3mo agoThank you for saying this. I've been saying this for years. No one listens.
- nchmy 3mo agomay i ask in what context youve been saying this? I suspect it aint ant colonies...
- KetoManx64 3mo agoWhen an ant colony has damaged ants or isn't making enough ants it's just better to mass import ants from another colony.
- nchmy 3mo agojust say what youre trying to say
- drekipus 3mo agoHe said it. Ants are just economic units and easily squishable/replaceable. I don't think anyone is adding anything to it.
- nchmy 3mo agoNo, ants are not the topic of discussion here... the original comment was extending the ant patterns to human communities, and the comment I replied to said they've been saying this for years (presumably about human communities). I'm trying to get rid of the misdirection and see exactly which ant colony practices people are saying should be done with/to human communities, and why.
- SquibblesRedux 3mo agoIn a sense, Aldous Huxley explored these ideas in his novel "Brave New World." [0] The novel describes a world were there is a rational order to human society, which has been engineered to be "optimal." A very good read I highly recommend. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
- Ouman 3mo agoSo the colony's "medical staff" are basically the people between jobs who happen to know everyone
- kdavis 3mo agoSurgery, antimicrobials, farming crops, animal husbandry... humans are late to the game.
- snarf21 3mo agoYeah, wood ants are particularly prolific in these areas. They are quite amazing creatures.
- afavour 3mo agoI’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.
- ggcr 3mo 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 3mo agoThat could imply that maybe ants have some sort of disability benefits for those who have lost limbs.
- altmanaltman 3mo agoVA NT
- BuyMyBitcoins 3mo ago>“maybe ants have some sort of disability benefit” Eusocial Security?
- wjholden 3mo agoI'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 3mo agoWhile 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.
- ggcr 3mo agoFascinating. 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/2026/0702Ameisen-Pflegerinnen.mp4 https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/fileadmin/uniwue/2026/0702Ameis...
- mallomarmeasle 3mo agoThat 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/2026/0702Ameisen-Pflegerinnen.mp4 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.
- mmooss 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoYou 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_file/pnas.2614400123.sapp.pdf https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2614400123/suppl...
- benjaminard 3mo agoAnd 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 3mo agoI am doubtful that ants feel conscious pain.
- ahahs 3mo agoWhat 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 3mo agoUntil 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 3mo agoIf 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 3mo agoNever 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60-iFyfjRo0
- mmooss 3mo agoFWIW, The Ants by Holldobler & Wilson is a famous book, afaik the leading book in its field.
- HelloUsername 3mo agoRelated video? "Cordyceps: attack of the killer fungi - Planet Earth Attenborough BBC wildlife" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8 (2008)
- robotnikman 3mo agoI wonder if Bees also show similar behavior