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Xinhua News Agency, Tokyo, July 15 (Reporter Qian Zheng) Using surgery to save lives is not exclusive to humans. An international research team recently reported in the American journal "Contemporary Biology" that they found that Florida bow-backed ants can diagnose the leg injuries of their injured companions and choose different treatment methods according to the injuries to improve their survival rate.

The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan recently issued a press release saying that researchers from the university and colleagues from institutions such as the University of Würzburg in Germany analyzed the differences in the "diagnosis and treatment" of Florida bow-backed ants by their companions when the femur was injured and the tibia was injured. The results showed that if the femur was injured, the companion would use its mouthparts to clean the wound before biting off the entire leg, while if the tibia was injured, the companion would only use its mouthparts to clean the wound.

Data show that the survival rate of ants with femur injuries that were amputated was 90% to 95%, while the survival rate of ants with tibia injuries that were only cleaned was 75%. In contrast, if the femur and tibia injuries were not treated, the survival rate was less than 40% and 15% respectively.

The researchers hypothesized that the treatment ants choose is related to the risk of infection at the site of injury. They used micro-CT imaging technology to study the structure of the ants' legs and analyze this association.

The researchers found that the femur of an ant is mostly made up of muscle tissue. If the femur is injured, the muscles are damaged and the blood circulation capacity decreases. However, the tibia has almost no muscle tissue, so pathogens may invade the body more quickly after injury. Observations have found that it takes at least 40 minutes for ants to amputate their companions. The researchers therefore inferred that after the tibia is injured, the ants cannot quickly amputate their companions to prevent the spread of pathogens, so they clean the tibia wound to reduce the chance of fatal infection.

The bulletin said that ants can diagnose wounds and carry out targeted treatment according to the infection of the wound, which is comparable to human medical technology. Researchers said it is not clear why ants can carry out such precise treatment. (End)