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Insect "Undertakers"
Indeed one of the smallest living creatures on our planet — the lowly ant — has demonstrated behavior that bears a striking similarity to that of humans dealing with death. Ants are social insects, living in colonies where each ant has a certain social role to play, as well as specific chores to carry out. And some ants are responsible with handling the colony's dead. These tiny undertakers are tasked with removing deceased ants to whatever is designated as their "cemetery'”. Those who study ants, particularly warring ants, also report that this species of ants remove their dead from the battlefield, dragging them back to their colony.
There's a species of European wood ants that tends
to get involved in long bloody ant wars. And in those cases, the victorious
ants bring the dead ants back home to eat because they're rich in protein. This
type of behavior — eating their dead — seems to be specific to that particular
type of ant, rather than reflecting general ant behavior.
Honeybees, another species of social insects, are so
fastidious about their living quarters that if an intruder such as a field mouse
enters a hive and dies inside it, the resident bees will try to remove the
remains. Should those removal efforts be unsuccessful, the bees will embalm the
corpse in resin collected from neighboring trees, according to professor Gene
Robinson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
