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...
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.
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.
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?
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...
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?
Eusocial Security?
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.
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.
"... 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.
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 ?
Carpenter ants amputate the injured legs of fellow ants to minimise the risk of infection. A new study involving a Würzburg researcher shows that this task is primarily carried out by ants switching from indoor to outdoor duties.
Patients in hospital generally trust the nursing staff. After all, they have undergone training and, in some cases, have several years’ professional experience.
In the case of carpenter ants, it is not nursing expertise that determines who cares for the patients: “There are no specialised ‘medics’ in the colonies. Instead, this task is carried out by worker ants that are in the process of transitioning from brood care to foraging,” says Dr Erik Frank, senior author of the study and head of an Emmy Noether research group at the Chair of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology at the University of Würzburg. This transitional phase for the ants usually lasts 20 days.
Another crucial factor is how many previous interactions the carer has had with the injured ant, says Alba Motes-Rodrigo, co-author from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). These include social interactions such as grooming one another or encountering each other by chance in the nest and ‘antennating’ – that is, touching each other with their antennae.
Ants transitioning between indoor and outdoor duties roam throughout the entire nest and are therefore better connected than other members of their colony. The research team published their findings in the journal *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* (PNAS).
For the study, the team examined six colonies, each comprising 110 ants of the species Camponotus fellah, which belongs to the genus of carpenter ants and is found primarily in the Middle East. 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.
“We have long known that the spatial organisation of a colony governs everyday tasks such as brood care or foraging. But our findings go even further,” explains Dr Ebi George, a co-author from the University of Lausanne. They show that the everyday spatial and social overlap between workers also determines temporary tasks such as life-saving wound care, George elaborates.
In a previous study, Frank and his team had already observed how carpenter ants treat wounds: they amputate the injured legs of their fellow ants by biting them off and treating them with antimicrobial substances. Their guiding principle is always: better safe than sorry.
The ants carry out prophylactic amputations. This not only protects the colony from infection but also doubles the survival rate of the injured workers. “Back then, we were able to show how the wounds are treated. Our current study now reveals who is primarily responsible for this,” says Frank.
Ebi Antony George, Alba Motes-Rodrigo, Laurent Keller, Erik T. Frank: “Social and Spatial Affinity Drive Wound Care in Ants”; in PNAS, 1 July 2026, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2614400123
Dr Erik Frank, Chair of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology, T +49 931 31-82183, erik.frank@uni-wuerzburg.de
Press release: “Carpenter ants: better safe than sorry”
About the video: It shows one ant amputating another ant's leg. The tracking system assigns a number to each ant, making it possible to track every interaction.