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ANTS TREAT CERTAIN LEG INJURIES WITH LIFESAVING AMPUTATIONS  
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Nell Greenfieldboyce
July 2, 2024
NPR
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_ “Not only can they do this, but they are even able to diagnose
the wounds and, depending on the location, adapt the treatment
accordingly to maximize the survival chances of the injured." _

Lab experiments show that some ants will treat the injured legs of
comrades, and when it's necessary will even perform medical
amputations., Bart Zijlstra, UNIL

 

When an ant injures its leg, it sometimes will turn to a buddy who
will help out by gnawing the leg off, effectively performing a
lifesaving limb amputation.

That’s according to some new experiments described
[[link removed]] in the journal _Current
Biology_, which show that ants are the only animal other than humans
known to practice amputation as a medical treatment.

“Not only can they do this, but they are even able to diagnose the
wounds and, depending on the location, adapt the treatment accordingly
to maximize the survival chances of the injured,” says Erik Frank
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ants at the University of Würzburg in Germany. “I find that truly
remarkable.”

Wound care after battle

In the past, his group has studied
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termite-hunting ants in the tropics substantially reduce the death
rate among injured nestmates by treating their wounds with antibiotic
secretions that come from a special gland.

But that gland doesn’t exist in a common species known as Florida
carpenter ants, or _Camponotus floridanus_. This species nests in
rotting wood and will fight rivals to defend its home, so Frank wanted
to see how these ants would react when confronted with the kind of
injuries that come with battle.

His team quickly observed that these ants would cut off wounded legs,
much like miniature Civil War-era surgeons. “And this really piqued
my interest,” he says.

An injured ant will present its leg to a nestmate, who will lick the
wound and then move up the leg to bite at the shoulder joint for many
minutes at a time, until the leg is severed. “You can see the other
one not moving, not really flinching and accepting it,” says Frank.

Almost all of the injured ants that got an amputation from a buddy
survived. Meanwhile, ants with leg injuries that were kept away from
their nestmates, so that they didn’t get this treatment, frequently
died.

To see how amputations helped, the researchers experimentally infected
open leg wounds on ants with pathogens. They found that the kind of
amputations that ants did would stop the infection from spreading and
becoming lethal.

Frank went even further and surgically amputated the ants’ injured
legs himself — essentially mimicking the ants’ surgical approach
— to see how the amputee fared. That confirmed, he says, “these
amputations were saving the lives of the infected individuals.”

The research has convinced other ant experts who were not involved in
these studies, like Daniel Kronauer
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The Rockefeller University. “The experiments are very thorough,”
says Kronauer. “To me, it sounds plausible.”

“Here you have an ant species that lives in a log in my backyard
where I grew up in Florida, and they’ve been doing clinical
amputation for millions of years, much longer certainly than humans
have ever done it,” says Clint Penick [[link removed]], a
social insect researcher with Auburn University who also was not
involved in this work.

“It’s really cool to see something like this, and to see really
strong research that backs up that this is actually a medical
treatment that ants have evolved to do to prevent infection,” says
Penick.

Armed with amputation instincts?

Interestingly, ants would only perform an amputation when an injury
was high up on an ant’s leg, close to the middle of its body. Wounds
lower down on the leg didn’t elicit this treatment, although ants
would lick at the injuries.

That observation prompted Frank’s team to try performing amputations
on ants with lower leg injuries that had been infected with bacteria.
They found that the ants always died.

Frank and his colleagues were puzzling over why amputation solely
seemed to work for upper-leg injuries, until they closely studied the
leg’s anatomy. They saw that muscles in the upper leg normally help
move blood-like liquid through an ant’s body. It’s those muscles
that get damaged when an upper-leg injury occurs. This means that
bacteria or other pathogens in an upper-leg injury would spread to the
rest of the body more slowly than they would from a lower-leg injury.

The fact that ants only perform amputations in certain circumstances
is “really cool,” says Kronauer.

“They can tell where on the leg the injury has occurred, right? And
depending on where exactly the leg has been injured, it makes sense to
amputate or it does not make sense to amputate,” he notes.

Still, he cautions that it’s not like ant medics are evaluating the
wound and consciously weighing the pros and cons of treatment options,
like a human doctor would.

“I don't think they have some kind of crazy cognitive capacities,”
says Kronauer. “They have basically evolved over like thousands and
thousands and probably millions of years to be kind of
‘programmed’ to react to different kinds of injuries in a certain
way.”

Even so, says Penick, humans tend to think that their medicine is
uniquely sophisticated, and yet this common backyard ant essentially
does surgery.

And even when an ant had a lower-leg injury that could not be treated
with amputation, he notes, its nestmates would still tend to the
wound, apparently applying some kind of antimicrobial secretions that
often proved to be life-saving.

“My own work shows that a lot of ants produce antimicrobials,”
adds Penick, who says amputation “is just another example of things
that are in the public health repertoire that ants have to work
with.”

_Nell Greenfieldboyce is a NPR science correspondent._

* ants
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* amputation
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* wound repair
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