Meet the Ants That Can Perform Surgery to Save Lives

Research on Florida carpenter ants reveals they employ advanced medical techniques like amputation and wound cleaning based on injury type, significantly enhancing survival rates compared to untreated cases.

A new study published in Current Biology reveals that humans are not the only ones who save lives through surgery. Researchers have shown how Florida carpenter ants, a common, brown species native to its namesake, selectively treat the wounded limbs of fellow nestmates—either by wound cleaning or amputation. When experimentally testing the effectiveness of these “treatments,” not only did they aid in recovery, but the research team found the ants’ choice of care catered to the type of injury presented to them.

First author Erik Frank, a behavioral ecologist from the University of Würzburg, said: “When we’re talking about amputation behavior, this is literally the only case in which a sophisticated and systematic amputation of an individual by another member of its species occurs in the animal Kingdom.”