Ants are exceptional insects for so many reasons. To date, the Camponotus floridanus ant is the only known representative of the animal kingdom capable of performing surgical operations on wounded or sick mates.
They're talented doctors
When one member of an ant family is infected, its mates are able to perform surgical amputations to not only save its life, but also to keep the entire colony from getting sick. They can both amputate the injured or infected limb and treat it when the situation is still correctable. This method is not seen in any other animal species.
Megaponera analis ants are capable therapists. They use special gland secretions from which they inject antimicrobial agents into an area at risk of infection. The surgeon ants Camponotus floridanus, which live in Florida, do not have this gland, so they perform operations only mechanically. Moreover, they are able to distinguish the parts of a limb and operate on them according to their ant anatomy. Before surgical intervention, the little doctors always clean and disinfect the wound with the help of their mouth apparatus.
Depending on the type of wound, ants are able to decide whether a limb needs to be amputated or whether cleaning the wounded area is sufficient.
If the lower leg is wounded, which tends to heal faster, treatment is often limited to disinfection only. This is the responsibility of a special "doctor" who is not a surgeon. In this case, the survival rate of ants is 75%. However, if the thigh is damaged, another ant gets to work and amputates the damaged limb, and the survival rate rises to 95%. Amputation takes approximately 40 minutes.
They know how to play dead.
It has been observed that Australian ants can simulate the collective death of an entire colony. Polyrhachis femorata ants, previously found only on the continent, have been discovered on Kangaroo Island. This island is located off the southern coast of Australia and is separated from the mainland by a 20-kilometer stretch of sea. The discovery happened by accident: the researchers first thought there had been a tragedy and all the ants were dead. Then one of them moved.
It was thus realized that this was a case of mass thanatosis, which some animals resort to when pretending to be dead to fool predators. Animal researchers had noticed ants using this tactic before, but this was the first time they had seen an entire colony resorting to it at the same time. That this was an organized defense was further confirmed by the fact that the ants covered all the entrances and exits of the anthill with organic material before pretending to be dead. The only mistake was made by the ant that moved, exposing the entire colony.
They behave like a single brain
The way ants in an individual colony make decisions resembles the workings of a neural network. When they decide what to do, they do it in such an organized way, all at the same time, as if they were controlled by a single brain. Indeed, all the individuals in a colony are forced to act simultaneously by something based on a combination of external and internal data. A study of this phenomenon was conducted on a decision that ants have to make in a heat wave: when should they leave the anthill?
The ants were given an artificial colony with a controlled temperature and a camera lens was placed over it. Then several families of ants with a 2:1 ratio of adults to larvae were placed there and the temperature was slowly increased. The insects began to leave the anthill, but the temperature threshold depended on the size of the family. 36 workers and 18 larvae left the anthill when the temperature reached 34°C, while a family of 200 workers and 100 larvae withstood a heat of more than 36 degrees Celsius.
The escape mechanism in all cases was the same: the ants quietly did their work until the temperature reached a critical threshold for them, after which they all left together in an organized manner. Here the external factor is temperature, and the internal factor is the size of the ant family. It turns out that each individual ant is a neuron and the colony is a brain. The most interesting thing is that all ants always know exactly the size of their family, which means that they know exactly when to start evacuating.
They know how to repair their buildings
Research shows that ants are able to repair not only their anthill, but also the trees on which they live or through which the path to their home passes. If a desired tree branch is damaged by humans or other animals, ants can "fix" it within hours. This discovery was made by a teenage son of a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution in Panama.
In 2020, a high school student, Alex Vcislo, armed with a slingshot, shot a 9 mm clay ball into a tree trunk. The boy did not know that colonies of ants of the Azteca alfari species living in that area have a symbiotic relationship with trees: they use them as shelter and in return protect their leaves from attacks by insect herbivores. Alex's slingshot shot made a hole in the trunk of one of the trees, which, to his surprise, disappeared 24 hours later.
Alex told about it to his friends, who became so interested in the phenomenon that they all enrolled together in the Smithsonian Institution's volunteer program. The boy's father helped the young team of researchers conduct the experiment. Armed with drills, they went into the woods and drilled several holes of different diameters in the trees of the cecropia, a particular favorite of these ants. It took the ants only a couple of hours to noticeably reduce the holes, and the next day all the holes in the trees completely disappeared.
For repair work, the industrious insects used leaves and other plant material crushed and mixed with the resin of the tree itself, leaking from the damaged bark. In the case where the hole was near a colony, before starting repairs,
the ants evacuated the larvae from the anthill. Further research by the young volunteers revealed that the ants had learned to "heal" trees to repair bark damage caused by the sharp claws of anteaters and sloths.