Ants perform surgical amputations on other ants

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/03/ants-perform-surgical-amputations-on-other-ants.html

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Is this going to be how the Ant-Man films end?

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came here for this, beat me to it :wink:

(additional; original, uncut lost ending (age restricted).)

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7AMh

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Ants perform surgical amputations on other ants

Two things:

  1. Ant-putations, surely?
  2. “on other ants” is a bit redundant, isn’t it? It would be very impressive if an ant were to attempt auto-surgery, or surgery on a human (though, that might be what the biting is).
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Since the study isn’t linked, here is the article if anyone is interested:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(24)00805-4

Happy for Würzburg to get a shout out (their insect group is fantastic), but the research in this study was done in Switzerland and Japan

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And another thing.

We know that the ants don’t have to worry about post operative infections when carrying out these amputations. They are actually very resistant to both bacterial and viral infections,due to their little anty bodies.

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Apparently all it takes is an ant bite while getting an x-ray at the dentist …

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MASH: Mobile Ant Surgical Hospital.

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I very much didn’t understand the explainer. (Maybe in TFA, maybe the lay lede for it.) It’s like; oh, it would take them 40 minutes to gnaw off their pal’s femur if that were infected, and the infection would spread in 5 min, so they don’t bother. So it’s only the other segments? Still, maybe neat authority from the ant to say ‘oh that won’t scale.’

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They were allegedly used as surgical staples, but not voluntarily. Their hearts weren’t in it, just their heads.

I know it’s not an easy life being an ant, but as an American I’m jealous of yet another civilization that, unlike us, figured out how to get it’s constituents health care on demand.

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