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Ants in Florida perform life - bring through surgical operation on their peers , scientist have discovered . They are only the 2nd fauna in the world known to do this — along with man .
The research worker get hold that Florida carpenter emmet ( Camponotus floridanus)identify limb wounds on their nestmates , then handle them with either cleaning or amputation .
Florida carpenter ants perform amuptations on nestmates when their legs are injured.
The team published 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 advanced and taxonomic amputation of an individual by another member of its species occur in the animate being kingdom , " study first authorErik Frank , a behavioral ecologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany , said in a statement .
In 2023,Frank ’s squad discoveredthat an African ant specie , Megaponera analis , can treat infected wounds in their nestmates with an antimicrobial content grow in their secretory organ . Florida carpenter ants do not have any tantamount secreter , so the squad require to find out how this species handles wounds in member of the settlement .
Specifically , the research worker count at two types of branch wounds : laceration on the femur ( thigh ) and those lower down on the tibia .
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In experimentation , they observed that theantstreated their nest members ' femur injuries by cleaning the wound with their mouths before amputating the stage by repeatedly burn it , while the shin wound were treat with just cleaning .
The surgeries resulted in significant advance in the selection of their ant patient role . selection rates for femur injuries improved from less than 40 % to between 90 and 95 % when amputations were performed , while survival rates for tibia injuries amend from 15 % to 75 % following cleaning .
The scientists suggest pismire only amputate femur injuries , rather than all leg trauma , because of speed limitation .
An amputation take emmet at least 40 minutes to complete .
After study micro - CT scans of the emmet , the researchers speculated that the damage to origin - pump muscles in the femur induce blood circulation to slow . This would mean that bacterium - laden blood would take longer to enter the body , permit the ants enough time to cut off the limb .
Ant shin , meanwhile , have comparatively minuscule muscle tissue paper , so infection can go around quicker . This means amputation would take too long for the ants to stop the spread of harmful bacteria , so they instead focus on cleaning the wound .
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" The emmet are able to diagnose a wound , see if it ’s septic or unimaginative , and treat it consequently over long menstruum of time by other individuals — the only aesculapian scheme that can rival that would be the human one , " Frank suppose .
The ant ' ability to identify and treat lesion selectively is innate , the researcher said , and that they did not recover evidence of acquisition .
The scientists are now exsert their research to other ant coinage that do n’t own particular antimicrobial gland to see if other ants have the ability to perform surgery .
