Ant Surgeons? Transatlantic Butterflies? Worms That Make Antibiotics? | Slate

This story references a new study from the University of Oxford and the MBL.

Invertebrate science is crawling with breakthroughs. It should always be this way.

It’s been a busy few weeks in the news in so very many ways, including for science stories about creepy-crawlies and other unsightly animals that make most people—unfairly—recoil in horror.

First, there was the news that ants can perform lifesaving emergency amputations on one another to treat leg wounds and prevent infections. Diligent insect medics, with brains barely as big as the punctuation in size-8 font, were spotted carefully assessing the injuries of nestmates with a few gentle licks before operating with razor-sharp jaws. According to researchers, this is the first time that lifesaving amputations have been observed in a nonhuman animal. ...

More? Thursday’s news: puddle-dwelling wormlike organisms known as rotifers long ago stole DNA from bacteria, incorporated it into their own genome and—when feeling under the weather—use this DNA to produce their own antibiotic remedies. It’s likely that rotifers evolved this incredible trick more than a million years before Alexander Fleming dabbled with “mould juice” to stumble upon penicillin. “In the current scientific age,” the discovery’s co-author Chris Wilson told me, “the undiscovered country is the DNA of little-known creatures, and the rotifers have the most outlandish DNA landscapes of any known animal.” Read rest of the story here.

Source: Ant Surgeons? Transatlantic Butterflies? Worms That Make Antibiotics? | Slate