Ants: Who looks after the injured in a colony? | Hacker News Reader

Ants: Who looks after the injured in a colony?

uni-wuerzburg.de

116 pointshhs55 comments

> 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.

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

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.

As 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 ?

eusocial 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

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.

*gene level

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

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

When an ant colony has damaged ants or isn't making enough ants it's just better to mass import ants from another colony.

just say what youre trying to say

He said it. Ants are just economic units and easily squishable/replaceable.

I don't think anyone is adding anything to it.

No, 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.

In 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

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

Just like a medieval barber surgeon.

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

flashback to the dr barber from misadventures of flapjack

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

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

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.

> 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?

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

VA NT

>“maybe ants have some sort of disability benefit”

Eusocial Security?

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?

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.

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

You said its an "Untestable claim" yet you are sure its "highly unlikely" ants are capable of emotion. Which is it?

I think you're wrong, and its painfully obvious that ants do indeed form a bond with their community. The proof is in the system.

> You said its an "Untestable claim" yet you are sure its "highly unlikely" ants are capable of emotion. Which is it?

It can be both, right? To the best of our knowledge, they are not likely to have complex emotions. We cannot test it due to physical and technological limitations.

You can argue the other way but "proof is in the system" is not a very sound one.

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.

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

I’d be careful labelling any of that “love” though. There’s certainly not any proof of ants “loving” each other, they have a community, sure, but that’s just doing what best serves their colony. I’d need more evidence to consider that “love”.

Try experiencing it yourself firsthand, first

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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

You can have sub 0.1mm resolution with specialised coils

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.

I am doubtful that ants feel conscious pain.

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.

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.

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

I wonder if Bees also show similar behavior

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