I think in this case forcibly ejecting the injured ant could lead to more injuries of otherwise healthy ants.
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...
Wonder if this has something to do due with space constraints. If the study was done in a controlled nest, it must be space bounded one way or another. Dynamics might change when in real-world?
The ants love one another, as shown by their child-rearing, grooming, playing, the "antennating" mentioned in the article, collective defense, and deliberate handling of their dead.
We don't understand their language, but I have a certain faith that ants experience a very similar kinship for their sisters as we. If they were strictly-rational robots then why would they show these behaviors?
So there are serious people who think if the chimps(or any social species for that matter) ever survive 200 million years borrowing ant like behavior at individual and group level is a possible way.
I remember when I was much younger I got cancer. The same cancer Hank Green had more recently if you want a relateable celebrity example. It's fixable, and I live in a country with universal healthcare, so of course they fixed it. Even if you care only about simple economics that's a sound investment. I was already a massive net cost, needing feeding and care for decades before I became an adult able to do something useful and then almost immediately (in fact, technically before getting my first "real" job) getting cancer. If you do nothing the cancer kills me, we can't prove it's fatal because we figured out how to cure it† before modern scientific medicine and it would be unethical to study that on real volunteers now, but we can observe that crazy people who insist "No" when offered a cure today do die, horribly, as you'd expect if it's deadly.
But under universal healthcare of course you fix people like me, we become ordinary productive citizens and contribute to society including by paying some eyewatering amount of taxes over the subsequent years, which helps pay for said universal healthcare.
Many cases aren't like mine, but we forget that quite a lot are, and without universal healthcare you are net losing money so as to hurt poor people which is full-on "Capitalism is a death cult" insanity.
† Some people will tell you cancer can't be "cured". Well, OK, the doctors who treated me do this all day every day, they'd never had a young man die of this cancer. They'd had some close calls, some old men die of this cancer, and they'd had plenty of young men die from other cancers under their care, but this one, nope. There are technical reasons, but they're boring and Hank Green probably made a better video explaining them than I could.
I wonder what kind of biometrics allow that. The ants do not seem to be tagged individually in the linked video: https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/fileadmin/uniwue/2026/0702Ameis...
Not to be too speciesist, but the ants kind of all look the same to me.
"... the team examined six colonies, each comprising 110 ants .... Using a fully automated tracking system, the researchers were able to precisely monitor the movements and hundreds of thousands of interactions of each ant, as well as their wound care, over a period of weeks."
I wonder about the background of that software - how does it work, who developed it, how much does it cost, how much data does it output? It's applications are profound, including for human privacy, but I think I already knew about its use there.
I'd like to read the paper to skim over the methodology but it's not open-access :(
[1] https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/fileadmin/uniwue/2026/0702Ameis...
To keep everybody around you healthy makes the probability of caching a disease lower for yourself, too.
Grooming behaviour in primates helps in the same way. And it is so important that it is linked to all kinds of mental rewards.
To let disease run amok in your own neighborhood it would be very costly.
I'd imagine it as having dozens of clones of myself, and one of them is tasked with reproducing for the rest of us. It sounds like a total lack of individualism, but if the offspring has my genes and is raised like me (potentially by me), how far is it from being my own ?
Exactly zero of those things you list also spread disease throughout the population, and are aggressively anti-science. They only arguably affect the person themselves and the overall HC costs.
Moreover, for the active items you listed: driving, contact sports, skydiving, rock climbing, etc., nearly everyone doing them takes real precautions to minimize the health risks — their motivation is to continue doing the event, not to get injuries which would prevent them enjoying their activity.
In the passive harms you mentioned, the people are passive, not active. No one intentionally becomes obese or sedentary or ruins their diet; they simply fail to have the motivation or to learn the knowledge required to do better (or they have actual conditions that prevent them from doing so). There is nothing intentional about it.
In contrast, the anti-science anti-vaxxers willfully maintain and aggressively spread their ignorance and impose their ignorant bad decisions as costs on society and increased health risks for everyone.
The anti-vaxxers are doing the opposite of taking safety-measures to improve health and safety of their activities — instead, they actively evade free, safe, and effective health and public health measures.
The anti-vaxxers are doing the opposite of passively failing to maintain their health — instead they actively deny science, medicine, and public health issues, and actively evade recommendations or mandates.
As the study illustrated, they are literally more stupid and anti-society than ants. They freeload off the health care system and herd immunity built and maintained by their smarter peers.