Ants perform teeny tiny operations to save their injured comrades

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Some ants have evolved to perform surgery on one another

A few weeks ago I talked about self-medicating primates, and I promised I’d circle back to lots more facts about other animals treating illnesses with edibles and ointments. But then a new study came out about something even wilder: animals performing surgery on one another. And what’s even weirder is that these procedures, which the authors say are the first-ever evidence of deliberate, therapeutic amputations in non-human animals, didn’t take place in our close relatives. They’ve been observed in ants.

So, okay, we’re not actually talking about bugs scrubbing up and using itty bitty scalpels. Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus) remove the injured legs of their nestmates by chomping them off. But while the methods are a bit crude, scientists say the behavior is plenty sophisticated.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen ants medicating. A recent study by the same team found that Matabele ants, which live in sub-saharan Africa, produce a substance from glands on their backs that contains more than 50 different components with antimicrobial or wound-healing properties. When the ants end up with infections, which happens a lot thanks to the brutal skirmishes they get into with the termites they eat, their comrades lick their wounds and secrete this healing goo into them.

But while Florida carpenter ants are known to be very territorial and prone to injuries from fights with other ants, they don’t have the right glands to make that same medicine. A lot of arboreal ants lost these glands sometime in their evolution, maybe because not being underground leaves them less susceptible to pathogens. But researchers were curious about how they might have adapted other ways to handle battle wounds.

As it turns out, their solution is chopping the whole thing off. Check out this week’s episode to learn more!

FACT: When the planet got hot, sharks moved up in the world

Climate change can do a lot of damage—which we’re obviously seeing right now as the world keeps getting hotter and hotter. But, past climate change events have had a pretty stark impact on the world we see today. This is especially true of one species: the shark. In their early days, sharks were bottom-dwellers, meaning they thrived at the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean. But a giant underwater volcanic event that happened some 93 million years ago changed all of that.

Within a few thousand years of the volcanic event, loads of nutrients were released, allowing mass feeding and growth of plants and animals. But when these organisms died, their decomposition and fall towards the sea floor caused further oxygen depletion, eventually releasing clouds of carbon dioxide into the oceans and atmosphere. That resulted in a global oceanic anoxic event, where the ocean is completely depleted of oxygen.

For the deep-dwelling sharks, that meant move up in the water column to a more oxygen-rich zone or die.

A study that came out this year demonstrated just how much had to change about sharks physiology (from their new arm-like fins and the constant need to keep swimming) for this to happen, and introduced the beginnings of shark families that house some of today’s most fascinating species, like Great Whites and Hammerheads.

All this goes to show that big climate events have profound effects on the creatures living on the planet—and the one happening right now outside our windows is happening way faster than anything we have historical context for.

FACT: The Milky Way has too many neighbors

By Dr. Moiya McTier

Galaxies live in neighborhoods, and after decades of thinking the Milky Way didn’t have enough neighbors, now scientists think we have too many. Based on data from the Subaru telescope, an international team of astronomers determined that we might be surrounded by 500 small satellite galaxies—10x the number we can see!

For more on this bustling galactic neighborhood, check out this week’s episode. And you can stay up to date with me, Dr. Moiya, by checking out my website.