Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows | Hacker News Reader

Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows

theguardian.com

216 pointshackernj67 comments

Ants are hella cute. Sometimes I would get ants coming into my home, and it was fun watching them try to find food somewhere. I tried to keep it clean. Were these the recon teams sent to find stuff?

Sometimes I’d bring them to my desk and it was cool hanging out with some ants. I eventually caved and bought some sugar cubes. They seemed to LOVE them. I chipped them into smaller chunks, and watching ants yeet them on their “shoulders” and carry it back home was so cool.

Then somehow they’d just not show up again for many months. But I was always glad when I’d start seeing them come back.

Why are they so cute :o

This comment makes me wonder if there is an ant equivalent of toxoplasmosis which makes one think that cats are irresistibly cute

I think what you're saying is an urban legend. Do you have a credible source for the statement that toxoplasmosis makes one think cats are incredibly cute?

I think it's hyperbole of this: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.13777

Cats ARE incredibly cute, so toxoplasmosis actually helps you perceive reality more accurately.

Easier for example in Spanish: hormiga, awww. So cute, and it’s even close to amigo. Ants should be friends. I actually feel we are in it together against the cockroaches and spiders.

Given how much you liked hanging with ants, I recommend you try spiders in a garden. Look for a spider web where one is hanging, toss a small piece of debris that breaks a little of the web, and watch in awe how they repair it.

I would hunt for my friend spider. Find an ant, throw it into the net, watch how quickly spider friend descends right to the spot and spins it into a take-out container.

Really only works with live victims. If they died before I threw them on the web, the spiders usually wouldn’t recognize from the vibrations that there was food at that grid location. I did trick a spider once with a pine needle, tapping/shaking the body of the dead prey until I got lucky and the spider came. Usually this didn’t work though, tripping whatever heuristic the spiders used was tricky.

Haha. Not a huge fan of spiders, if I see one in my home I’ll catch him and put him outside.

Idk why but I feel really bad for critters. I’m in SF next to a park.

Every morning on my walk if I see a pill bug, a worm or caterpillar, or some other critter on the side walk I’ll grab a leaf and put them back in the park. Don’t want them to get squished :(

Back to spiders tho. I had jumping spiders in my last apartment. Had a really pretty patterned one in my office that would turn and face me whenever I moved. It lived in my blinds for a few weeks and then I never saw it again :(

Had some pet silverfish too. I have a TON of moleskines and I’d feed them old pages.

Sorry I’m probably weird for loving all these little “pests” but I find them really wonderful.

I rarely go through this part of the basement, I spilled about a table spoon of water on the floor and I come back 10 minutes later and a giant 7cm leg span Wolf spider was drinking from the newly formed puddle. Now I make sure there is plenty of water available in the basement.

Ants are the only bugs I dont mind having around. Sometimes I get hundreds of them in my kitchen and sometimes just sit and watch them lol

I found it's easier to like them once I viewed them as nature's janitors.

Depends on the kind of ants and where they are. Some ants have quite a potent sting, and I once had a bed full of ants, even if there were the harmless kind, I didn't particularly appreciate having dozens of ants crawling on me at night.

Note: for the latter, I lived in an RV at that time, the bed was literally at arms reach from the kitchen. I tried to use insecticide gel, which ended up making the problem worse, as I now had dying and crazy ants falling down from the ceiling. Turned out the source of infestation was a dirty bike bag that ants turned into a colony, throwing it out solved the problem.

I also recently learned that ants remove deceased workers from their nest, and dump their corpses somewhere else.

Source: my office carpet

I went down a YT ant rabbit hole years ago. On top of that, most garbage collection ants seem to be ants that are close to death, so that when they die, they are near the garbage/disposal area anyway, and might not even need to be carried there when they die.

I think it also helps if the dead ants are diseased / poisoned / covered in deadly fungus too. An ant near death anyway is less value to the colony, and it doesn't matter as much if it gets sick from moving the dead body

Certain bee fungi are detected by the colony's workers — a more-senior worker might then take a one-way trip out of the hive, with infected co-worker as cargo.

She doesn't come back (to not infect the hive, herself).

Is your carpet "somewhere else" or is it the ant nest?

We have a drawing book for little children and this is indeed clearly painted and labeled on one of anthill cut-through images, named 'landfill' for waste and cemetery.

Yes, they dispose of corpses on their garbage dump. (Every ant hill has a designated sanitation area.)

They also remove their dead from other places. For instance, if I squish an ant in my kitchen, somewhere between minutes and hours later it will be carried off by another ant.

Apparently if you pile up enough of them, it can reach a critical mass where the rest of the colony says "fuck this" and "nopes out". A large enough pile of dead ants near a colony entrance can cause the rest of the colony to leave their current location, pack everything up, and re-build their colony elsewhere.

My friend used this to his advantage during college to successfully evict several ant colonies from his room. YMMV.

I don’t know how successful he was if he had several ant colonies in his room. Perhaps they regrouped and returned to another spot in his room. Perhaps this particular ant colony just loved his room a lot.

In his case, he ended up with no ants. But I'm not sure it works the same for all species!

It is also possible that another insect ate the carcass (perhaps while living, albeit disabled). Cockroaches are notorious.

I’ve never seen a cockroach (or any other insect but an ant) in 12 years living in this house.

¡La Cucaracha!

May you remain so blessed...

Bees do the same. In fact, IIRC, honey bees do different tasks as they age, graduating from nursery duty to hive maintenance / cleaning through to actual honey collection.

Did you publish in a peer reviewed journal?

Stunning!

They are also the only other animal on the planet to manipulate it's environment to grow food, apart from humans, by protecting aphids. Sometimes they even wage war to neighboring nests, and kidnap larvae which subsequently grow as workers. Ottomans were very fond of this practice.

Ant's face photographed on an electron microscope shows an animal with a very high level of intelligence.

> Ant's face photographed on an electron microscope shows an animal with a very high level of intelligence.

What? I can't tell if I'm missing something, or is this some meme.

I am talking about this photo [1], even though it's not after all taken by an electron microscope. Pretty scary, but intelligent face, is it not?

[1] https://factcheck.afp.com/macro-photograph-ant-taken-stacked...

Is "looks a bit like a human from this angle" what we classify as "having intelligence"?

One can't determine the intelligence of a being by looking at its face.

It sure would make interviews easy though.

Haha is that real? I will definitely kill every ant I see from now on, they are clearly evil.

They don't just protect them as a food source. Some wood ants will literally farm them. If a they expand or a tree isn't producing enough sap, they will move aphids to new trees putting them on a new sap source so that they can "milk" them for honeydew (aphid excreted sugar which is a major food source for wood ants).

I forgot to mention that woods ants also create their own medicine. Wood ants will combine resin from evergreen trees with formic acid (from themselves) to create a substance that is anti-microbial and the rub it all over themselves. [Source: I've been doing a lot of reading for background for a board game I'm designing.]

Quite interested in this board game. Do you have some more information on this?

It will be called Formica but I have a lot of work yet to do on it. It is set to be quite heavy and complicated, 2+ hour playing time. If you are interested, you can follow all my board game design stuff via @RoscoSchock on Twitter.

Yes, i have seen with my own eyes, ants protecting aphids in certain varieties of lentils. Aphids are called in Greek something akin to honeydew, "μελίγκρα" which translates roughly to "honeygra".

I didn't know they were actively moving them around, i thought ants were just protecting them.

Leaf cutter ants bring back leaves which are used to cultivate a fungus that is eventually to be consumed by the ants.

> manipulate it's environment to grow food, apart from humans, by protecting aphids

And of course the ones that literally garden fungus.

The ants where I now live are so big that it’s easier to see their more subtle behaviors. About the length of a finger nail. Yeah yeah I’m sure there are bigger ants than that, but I consider that pretty big for an ant!

They are fascinating to watch. I often see one ant carrying another, and occasionally see a group of ants trying to get another one unstuck.

>I often see one ant carrying another

That might not be an act of kindness toward the carried ant. It could be banishment from the colony to prevent the spread of fungus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8

Where do you live now?

Colorado mountains, southwest of Denver!

If you are into ant behavior have I got a treat for you, https://www.youtube.com/@AntsCanada

I have watched many hours of that channel. I'm no ant expert, nor do I have much interest in ants in general, but that channel made understanding ant behavior sensational! Big props to the creator

Turns out that although the author is born in Toronto, he lives in Southeast Asia now, and just kept the AntsCanada name since he had already registered the domain.

The tropical vivarium videos make a lot more sense now!

The video seems interesting, but I gotta say the constant hands-on-head, "you wont BELIEVE what happens NEXT" lines, the over the top sound effects, it seems modern-day-discovery-channel style is kind of silly. I can't tell if it's intentionally being a bit silly and having fun, or it's trying way to hard to 'youtube' it up.

> The nest mates then proceeded to repeatedly bite the injured leg until it was cut off

More evidence in favor of ants being the cause of the zombie apocalypse.

Kinda true, they are getting predated on by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis

Existential fear warning https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/zombie-ant-fungi-kno...

I once saw a spider amputate its own leg. It was severely crippled, only able to move in small circles. Then it suspended itself from a small shelf and started biting off the one leg that was immobile. After it was done it lowered itself on the ground and walked away totally fine.

Since the behaviour seemed very innate I figured that it must be something that happens frequently and is a known phenomenon.

Or maybe ant scientist just don't read spider papers :)

That's a common adaptation to escaping predators that many long-limbed arthropods have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotomy

I have some carpenter ants that appear every winter, then they make off with some of the blades of my grass.

Just a bit after you stomp some of the workers or drop some diatomaceous earth on them you can see soldiers appearing in the entrances to their holes. They seem to actively try and block injured and/or dirty workers from re-entering the nest.

Another week, another story about how we aren't as unique as we like to think. Each discovery points to more intelligence, more skills, more capacity for emotion or pain. One day I think we'll regret how we treated animals so poorly while the evidence was there all along. All that was needed was the precautionary principle.

Buddhists had discovered this ages ago.

They could see more or less intuitively how consciousness evolved and that potential descendants of every living thing are capable of it and that each living thing is somewhere on the line.

Caveat: this is my personal interpretation which deviates a bit from the teachings

But not as much as the Jains who walk with their heads down to make sure they're not stepping on anything.

Buddhists borrow many teachings from the Vedic culture (since the philosophy was developed within the vedic landscape).

Consciousness is considered the irreducible entity (Self) that acquires a temporary material body. In essence, consciousness is the same, regardless of the body. So, an ant's consciousness has just as much value as yours, which is why every being is seen with equal respect.

Just because an individual happens to be experiencing reality through the body of an insect, it gives us no right to harm them and crush them for fun or any other reason. If the situation flips, we'd be the first ones to curse the ones hurting us.

That’s why I’m vegan

For the few people here who are not useless assholes and don't want to kill these beautiful and perfect creatures, just spray vinegar mixed with water around your kitchen or whatever to drive them away.

Thanks for the tip but are you the kind of person that would save a cat over another person? You’re coming out swinging for practically no reason

Yeah if the person was a rapist or murderer or criminal and it's my cat....yeah. The murderer dies and I save my cat..........??? are you not like that?

I’m about 90% sure that you’re trying to make a sarcastic joke but I’ve seen enough people maliciously put words in others mouths thats it’s genuinely hard to tell. Sarcasm isn’t good in text sadly

Will Wright has a lifelong obsession with ants, which he expressed in the classic 1991 Maxis game "SimAnt", that lets players role play as "Ant Jesus", who can sacrifice his life so that others may live.

In this 1991 sim game, you played as Ant Jesus:

https://www.pcgamer.com/saturday-crapshoot-simant/

>SimAnt really is the weirdest simulation. For starters, you literally play as an ant. One ant. A single, solitary ant. Only not! You're really more like the God of the Ants, with powers that would be amazing and world-changing and beyond belief, if not for the unfortunate fact that... well, you're just an ant. You can die and be reborn for instance, like Ant Jesus, only with a larval stage. You have effective omnicognisance, with the ability to see the world and understand the human residents who dwell within it. Your charismatic power allows you to draw armies of fellow ants and lead them into battle against the foul humans, spiders, and other things that stalk the back garden. Too bad the whole "being an ant" thing means it doesn't usually go so well. If only you had some proper weapons. Like the Holy Hand Grenade of Sim Antioch.

Schneier on Security: The Security Mindset

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_...

>Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled in with your address, and the company would mail you some ants. My friend expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail.

>I replied: “What’s really interesting is that these people will send a tube of live ants to anyone you tell them to.”

In 2011, Will Wright's "Stupid Fun Club" studio partnered with Milton Levine's "Uncle Milton Industries", who developed the original "Uncle Milton's Ant Farm" in 1956, to develop a creepily unique cult classic toy product, "Ant Farm Revolution", in which ants live and dig their tunnels in a green translucent nutrient gel developed by NASA, through which an LED light and lens projects frightening shadows of enormous ants crawling around on the ceiling!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Levine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formicarium

https://sfvbj.com/retail/uncle-milton-industries-inc/

>Most recently, Uncle Milton partnered with Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, on a multi-year licensing agreement for Ant Farm Revolution, the newest product under the Ant Farm brand. The most recent version of the toy includes a cylindrical gel-filled case, allowing consumers to watch ants create their own 3-D habitat. The product also features an integrated LED light and projecting lens that illuminates from within and projects ant shadows on walls and ceilings. It sells for $39.99.

Benjamin Taylor: Uncle Milton - Ant Farm Revolution:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/18480457/Uncle-Milton-Ant-Fa...

Uncle Milton: Ant Farm Revolution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3homHfkqaY

Uncle Milton Ant Farm Revolution Hands on Review:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcYY7iwPS0c

Proverbs in the Bible says "consider the ant" with respect on how to work.

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