In social animals, open wounds pose a risk not only for the injured individual but also for its wider social context, especially when the probabili...

Bailly et al. show that ants learn to tolerate genetically distinct non-nestmates through prolonged exposure. Once established, this tolerance persists with occasional re-encounters with ants of the s...

Emmy Noether Group Leader at @Uni_Wue 🇩🇪 studying the Evolution of Social Wound Care in Ants and beyond 🐜 🌴🐝🦍🚑

Animals often sustain injuries, which are susceptible to lethal infections. In social insects, wound care behaviours have evolved to reduce these risks. But the limits of wound care behaviours remain ...

Bey et al. show that ants that are attacked by other ants learn the recognition cues of their attackers. This leads to increased aggression against all ants from the attacker’s colony that share the same cues. Ants thus associatively learn the recognition cues of their attackers to form an “enemy template” that improves nestmate recognition.

If you are a Camponotus floridanus carpenter ant, you certainly would – at least, according to a recent study published in July of this year in Current Biology. Many thanks to Correspondant M…