Saving the injured: Rescue behavior in the termite-hunting ant Megaponera analis

Predators of highly defensive prey likely develop cost reducing adaptations. The ant Megaponera analis is a specialized termite predator, solely raiding termites of the subfamily Macrotermitinae at their foraging sites. The evolutionary arms race between termites and ants led to various defensive mechanisms in termites, e.g. a caste specialized in fighting predators. As M. analis incurs high injury/mortality risks when preying on termites, some risk mitigating adaptations seem likely to have evolved. Here we show that a unique rescue behavior in M. analis, consisting of injured nestmates being carried back to the nest, reduces combat mortality. After a fight injured ants are carried back by their nestmates, these ants have usually lost an extremity or have termites clinging to them and are able to recover within the nest. Injured ants, which are forced to return without help, die in 32% of the cases. Behavioral experiments show that two compounds, dimethyl disulphide and dimethyl trisulphide, present in the mandibular gland reservoirs, trigger the rescue behavior. A model accounting for this rescue behavior identifies the drivers favoring its evolution and estimates that rescuing allows for maintaining a 28.7% larger colony size. Our results are the first to explore experimentally the adaptive value of this form of rescue behavior focused on injured nestmates in social insects and help us identify evolutionary drivers responsible for this type of behavior to evolve in animals.