Helping in spite of risk: Ants perform risk-averse sanitary care of infectious nest mates
(PHYSorg.com Biology)

Ants care for their sick nestmates in different ways, depending on their own immune status. When they themselves are susceptible to dangerous superinfections, they use a different method to care for sick colony members compared to ants that are not susceptible, thus protecting themselves from infection. This is the result of a study of Professor Sylvia Cremer`s research group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria), with first authors Matthias Konrad and Christopher Pull. The study was published today in the journal PNAS.