Better safe than sorry: Leg amputations as a prophylactic wound care behaviour in carpenter ants

Animals often sustain injuries that are susceptible to lethal infections. In social insects, wound care behaviours have evolved to reduce these risks. But the limits of wound care behaviours remain unclear. Here we investigated the wound care behaviours of the ant Camponotus maculatus. Our findings show that amputation of legs infected with Pseudomonas aeruginosa significantly reduced mortality. However, nestmates do not differentiate between infected and sterile injuries, providing the same treatments regardless of the infection. Even though we show that early amputation correlates with higher survival rates, nestmates amputate indiscriminately on legs with fresh or old wounds. Additionally, cuticular hydrocarbon profiles differed between ants with infected or sterile wounds only 24 hours post-injury, a timepoint when amputations are no longer effective. We propose that C. maculatus workers perform prophylactic amputations regardless of injury state or age. This is in sharp contrast to...,
Experimental designs:
Wound care behavioural experiments
To compare the wound care behaviours towards infected and sterile-injured ants, we created 3 sub-colonies between November 8 and 21, 2022. Six previously marked ants were collected per sub-colony, and all of them were wounded at the centre of the right hind femur using sterile scissors. Afterwards, half were exposed to a 10 μL pathogenic solution by immersing their injury in a solution containing approximately. 105 P. aeruginosa bacteria (0.01 OD) for 2 seconds. In the control group, the wound was exposed to sterile PBS for 2 seconds. All the workers were then returned to their respective sub-colonies for observations (N=9 per group).
The experiment was also repeated with a higher infection dose, infecting ants with a ten times more concentrated P. aeruginosa solution (0.1 OD, approx. 106 P. aeruginosa bacteria). Observations followed the same procedure as above (N=9 per group). While these sample sizes are relatively small (refl..., # Data from: Better safe than sorry: Leg amputations as a prophylactic wound care behaviour in carpenter ants

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.w6m905r28](10.5061/dryad.w6m905r28)

## Description of the data and file structure

The zip file Analyses.zip contains folders divided into 4 analyses sections (analyses_chc_infection; analyses_efficiency_amputations; analyses_ethograms; analyses_time_amputations). Data analysis was conducted using R and RStudio. The zip file Data.zip contains 4 folders with the respective raw data (data_chc; data_efficiency_amputations; data_ethograms; data_time_amputations). Missing data code: NA

Each analysis folder has a corresponding .Rmd file with the code necessary to recreate all the figures and analyses from the study using the raw data csv files provided in the respective data folder. The .Rmd files are also annotated to explain each line of code.

#### File: Analyses.zip

**Description:** includes all the code to reproduce all the results of the study ...,