Up until recently, humans have been known as the only species to surgically remove limbs to increase a wounded individual’s chances of survival. Chimps have medically treated injuries of the wounded, ants have carried inebriated nest mates home to sleep it off — but selectively amputating limbs to save the life of another is distinctly a human behavior.
But Erik Frank, a biologist at the University of Würzburg, recently discovered that when the leg of a Camponotus floridanus ant was injured, its nest mates would bite it over and over again until it pulled cleanly away from the body. To save the injured ant, its nest mates surgically removed the limb.
“At the beginning, I thought we made some mistake or the experiment wasn’t working correctly,” says Frank, whose results were published last month in Current Biology. “We’ve never seen [amputation] anywhere before.”
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Frank found that the ants also didn’t do surgery on every leg injury — only injuries that had 100 percent chance of recovery following amputation. The ants didn’t bother with surgery on those injured at the tibia, a wound that has low survival rates.
