Ants can perform life-saving operations amongst themselves

It’s remarkable!

The news: https://www.livescience.com/animals/insects/ants-perform-life-saving-operations-the-only-animal-other-than-humans-known-to-do-so

Excerpts:

In experiments, they observed that the ants treated their nest members’ femur injuries by cleaning the wound with their mouths before amputating the leg by repeatedly biting it, while the tibia wounds were treated with just cleaning.

The surgeries resulted in significant improvements in the survival of their ant patients. Survival rates for femur injuries improved from less than 40% to between 90 and 95% when amputations were performed, while survival rates for tibia injuries improved from 15% to 75% following cleaning.

The scientists suggest ants only amputate femur injuries, rather than all leg injuries, because of speed limitations.

An amputation takes ants at least 40 minutes to complete.

 


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