Ants treat injured nestmates with antimicrobial compound in ant society

Related (dupe?):

"Ants recognise infected wounds and treat them with antibiotics" https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38848973 (469 points | 54 days ago | 163 comments)

Insects: Exactly as cool as my kids thought they were when they were five and I was going "Ewwww!" to their weirdo interests.

Also reminds me of some anecdote or something of someone in like an Aborigine tribe in Australia who pissed off the local ant nest, laid a cloth over it while the ants were on a rampage and biting the crap out of everything, then used the clothe -- not inundated with ant bite stuff -- to treat someone's medical problem.

> To investigate whether the high mortality of injured individuals is due to infection by pathogens, we collected soil from the natural environment and applied it to the wounds of experimentally injured workers (i.e., a sterile cut in the middle of the femur on the hind leg of an otherwise healthy ant).

> Eleven colonies, including queen and brood (colony size 1083 ± 258 ants), were excavated and placed in artificial nests in the field stations laboratory.

> Afterwards the injured ants were placed inside a cylindrical glass container with a diameter of 3 cm and a height of 5 cm.

> To test for mortality, the injured ant was checked upon once per hour for the next 36 h, if no reaction was observed even after shaking the container the ant was classified as dead.

I could never do this job.

The ants studied are Megaponera analis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaponera) which can grow to a size of almost 1 inch (25 mm)!

Wonder if it works on cordyceps.