Ant Surgeons

Move over, Hawkeye Pierce.

The work on ants
has profoundly affected
the way I think
about humans.
­–E. O. Wilson

For many years, I edited and wrote for the member magazine of the Science Museum of Minnesota, an institution saturated in multidisciplinary sciences that nationally respected -ologists, graphic and scenic designers, and curators made easy to understand for my English-major brain. One of my favorite jobs was writing up occasional stories for the magazine’s kids section, often profiles of some species of animal.

I also had stumbled into a freelance side gig writing commissioned educational books for kids who were at the time categorized as “reluctant learners.” Since a sizable population of that demographic were pre-teen boys, one book series featured gross and scary animals—Komodo dragons, alligators, sharks, big cats, and such.

I learned just enough about these animals to stop hating them. Even, in some cases, to fall in love them: I became hopelessly devoted to bats after writing up a feature that highlighted Bat Conservation International in Austin, Texas. Since I love all cats without qualification, I’d never had a problem with tigers. (Although all things considered, I’d rather die at the paws of a cougar, which is stealthy and pounces fast; you can be dead before you even realize you are in danger. By contrast, tigers share more than good looks with their domestic cousins ... they like to play with their dinner a while before shredding it.)

But giant lizards that slobber massively and leave parts of their conquered prey’s body to rot before finishing it off—you know, for that extra gourmet piquancy? Alligators that drag you under with their disgusting scaly jaws? The list went on and on, and inevitably, I grew to admire, albeit sometimes grudgingly, every animal I researched, even the most disgusting.

But I never wrote about ants. So I continued to despise them, especially when we get a leak somewhere and they march in thin lines all over our kitchen. I had no moral, ethical, or intellectual problem in my distain for the little bastards. My ace in the hole for righteously hating them is their similarity to human beings in one important way: they are the only animals besides us who engage in intentional, organized warfare.

And then my friend Patrick sent me a handful of great seeds for Well Seen topics (thanks, buddy!) and I looked into the current one.

And now I admire the little suckers. And that connection to humans? It’s there, too, but on the flip side: they do something amazing and—more to the point, altruistic—that we do, too.

Findings from a 2023 study that was released in July 2024 reveal that ants in Florida perform surgery on fellow ants, and they do so after determining whether or not it’s warranted. To our knowledge, they are the only animals other than us who do this. It isn’t true of all ants; the study focussed specifically on Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus).

If the injury was on the femur (the thigh), they cleaned the wound with their mouths and then amputated the leg, a process that takes at least 40 minutes. If it was on the tibia (the shinbone), they cleaned it but didn’t opt for surgery.

Scientists think it has something to do with the likelihood of bacteria-ridden blood getting into the wound before it can be treated, a fatal outcome. Damage to muscles, which help pump blood, slows down the ability for their little bodies to move blood around. Thighs have plentiful amounts of muscle, ergo, plentiful damaged blood-pumpers. On the other hand, if you’ve ever whacked your shinbone on a heavy coffee table, you know there’s not a lot of muscle (or anything else) protecting that bony appendage from expletive-inciting pain. So that ant’s bacterial blood can whoosh into a tibia’s wound faster than its peers can finish their surgery.

To investigate this hypothesis about blood movement and bacteria, researchers collaborated with 3D imaging and ant anatomy experts at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Professor Evan Economo and graduate students. Among the grad students was Lazzat Aibekova, who captured and analyzed images of the different ant leg segments’ structures. She postulated the theory regarding muscles and blood flow.

And, for once, data provided pretty unambiguous backup. Ninety percent of untreated ants died, whereas 75 percent of those treated survived. When femur injuries were treated with cleaning and amputations, 90–95 percent of the ants survived. Even those who received only cleaning on their tibias survived 15–75 percent of the time.

The study’s findings apply only to the one specific species. Most ant species have glands that secrete antimicrobials that fight infections, so no amputations are needed. But through evolution, those glands disappeared in the Florida ants, so those resourceful critters found other routes to saving lives.

Speaking of, here is a broadcast news video about this study that isn’t stupid even though it’s from Florida. And check out the above-cited Science article for a fantastic video of the ants doing their thing.

I can’t tell you how happy all this makes me. Not only can ants—or at least, these particular kinds of ants—perform surgery, conduct triage to diagnose whether or not the procedure can be attempted, and clean wounds with or without it, they also want to do all of this. To help save the lives of their warrior comrades. A Live Science article about this finding notes,

Like their hierarchical social structure, amputation is another one of the surprising ways that ants have evolved “sophisticated behaviors” very similar to humans.

The article quotes Rockefeller University ant biology expert Daniel Kronauer, who was not involved with the research: “It’s like retrieving injured soldiers from the battlefield and then treating them.”

The reporter for the not-stupid Florida broadcast noted another interesting bit from the study, that ants losing one or even two legs “return to running speed within a day or two.” He marveled about how these treatment activities reflected on the natures of the ants themselves, citing the final quote in the article he was referencing:

 “In the ant world, every individual holds value.”

Am I going to have to add Floridians to my list of animals I don’t hate anymore? Nah. I know nice people living there. Maybe just the colony’s Queen, sitting in the Governor’s mansion.

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Lagniappe: Night witches helped us win World War II. OK, they weren’t really witches, but still. Soviet aviator Marina Raskova, sometimes called the “Soviet Amelia Earhart,” came up with the idea. Between 1942 and the war’s end in 1945, the Red Army’s Night Witches flew more than 30,000 bombing missions against German forces. These women flew in groups behind other planes that served as decoys, while the last plane silenced its engine and glided quietly to the target area before firing. A history article notes, “This move gave the group its nickname, the “Nachthexen”—German for “Night Witches”—since the approaching planes sounded like whooshing brooms.”