Leafcutter ants appear to remember past infections and respond more aggressively to familiar threats, according to a new study.

This is because cleaning altruism, in which ants lick each other to get rid of pathogens, can also spread new contaminants. That's why they would have been more careful with a second infection ...

Characteristics of social immune memory were observed in colonies of Atta sexdens exposed to four different pathogenic fungi. The insects increased their cleaning behavior one week and one month after ...

From an airplane, cars crawling down the highway look like ants. But actual ants—unlike cars—somehow manage to avoid the scourge of stop-and-go traffic. Researchers are now studying these ...

Altruism by definition decreases the fitness ... The list of known eusocial animals includes ants, termites, some wasps, some bees, a small number of aphid and thrip species, two species of ...

Most ants have two morphologically differentiated adult castes - queens and workers - each irreversibly specialized for either reproduction or nonreproductive altruism such as foraging ...