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Ants in Florida perform spirit - saving surgery on their peers , scientists have discovered . They are only the second animate being in the world cognize to do this — along with humankind .
The research worker find that Florida carpenter pismire ( Camponotus floridanus)identify limb wounds on their nestmates , then address them with either cleaning or amputation .
Florida carpenter ants perform amuptations on nestmates when their legs are injured.
The team publish its finding Tuesday ( July 2 ) in the journalCurrent Biology .
" When we ’re talking about amputation behavior , this is literally the only case in which a sophisticated and taxonomic amputation of an individual by another member of its specie occur in the animal land , " study first authorErik Frank , a behavioural ecologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany , said in a affirmation .
In 2023,Frank ’s squad discoveredthat an African ant metal money , Megaponera analis , can handle septic wounds in their nestmates with an antimicrobial essence produced in their secretory organ . Florida carpenter ant do not have any tantamount glands , so the team wanted to find out how this species handles injury in members of the settlement .
Specifically , the researchers take care at two types of leg wounds : lacerations on the femur ( second joint ) and those lower down on the tibia .
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In experiments , they observe that theantstreated their nest member ' femur injuries by cleaning the wound with their sassing before amputating the leg by repeatedly biting it , while the shinbone wounds were treated with just cleaning .
The surgeries resulted in meaning improvements in the natural selection of their ant patients . endurance rate for femur injuries amend from less than 40 % to between 90 and 95 % when amputations were perform , while selection rates for tibia injury ameliorate from 15 % to 75 % following cleaning .
The scientists suggest ant only amputate femur injuries , rather than all stage injury , because of swiftness limitations .
An amputation takes ants at least 40 minutes to make out .
After studying micro - CT scans of the ants , the researcher hypothesise that the damage to blood - pumping muscles in the femur causes bloodline circulation to slow down . This would mean that bacterium - laden blood would take longer to enter the body , provide the emmet enough time to cut off the limb .
Ant tibias , meanwhile , have comparatively little sinew tissue paper , so contagion can spread quicker . This means amputation would take too long for the ants to quit the spreading of harmful bacteria , so they instead focus on cleaning the wounding .
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" The emmet are able to diagnose a wound , see if it ’s septic or aseptic , and treat it consequently over long period of clip by other individuals — the only medical system that can rival that would be the human one , " Frank said .
The pismire ' power to name and treat wounds selectively is innate , the researchers said , and that they did not find evidence of learnedness .
The scientist are now put out their research to other ant species that do n’t possess extra antimicrobic glands to see if other ant have the ability to do surgeries .
