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Amazing Ants / Phenomenal Formicae

Fascinating fact ascertained through ingenious means.

Ants on Stilts Help Show Bugs Have "Pedometers"
Richard A. Lovett
for National Geographic News
June 29, 2006

How do ants return home in a straight line, even after improvising random, twisty routes to find food? To find out, scientists attached tiny stilts to some insects and half-amputated others.

Hunting for food, ants roam haphazardly. But when they find it, they use celestial cues, perhaps from the sun, to head back to their nests more or less in a straight line—rather than retracing the tortuous journeys they'd made on their outbound searches.

So how does an ant know when to stop running?

It must not be based on seeing the nest entrance, because a returning ant rarely runs straight down into its hole. Instead, when they think they're in the right area, they stop running, make a U-turn, and pace back and forth until they find it.

(Related: "Army Ants Obey Traffic Plan to Avoid Jams, Study Says.")

Instead, a new study suggests that ants have internal "pedometers," or step counters, that help them gauge how far they have traveled.

Stilts and Stumps

After watching ants in Africa's Sahara, Harald Wolf, of the University of Ulm in Germany, decided to put the pedometer idea to the test in the laboratory.

Food was placed about 33 feet (10 meters) from an ant nest. When ants found the food the researchers collected the insects before they had time to carry it back to the nest.

Continued:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/06/060629-ants-stilts.html
 
Naughty_Felid said:
i thought it was all down to pheromones? Chemical markers to show where they've been?
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But they don't retrace their outward bound path, but head back in a straight line.

Do pay attention!
 
Yes, That's a Huge Floating Mass of Live Fire Ants in Texas

When there is flooding along the Gulf Coast, there are fire ants. The invasive ants congregate into living rafts, drifting through water until they reach solid ground again. It’s a time-honed survival strategy.

But when there is Hurricane Harvey-level flooding, there are not just small rafts but huge, dense mats of fire ants.

“Holy crap. I have never, in my entire career as an ant researcher, seen *anything* like this,” tweeted Alex Wild, curator of entomology at University of Texas at Austin, in response to the image above.
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/fire-ants-flooding-hurricane-harvey/538365/
 
THIS THREE-CONTINENT ANT MEGA-COLONY WILL CONQUER EARTH SOON
argentine-ants.jpg


THE ARGENTINE ANT PLAGUE

""
The prolific and pestilential Argentine ants were once native to South America, but we’ve unintentionally introduced them everywhere else too (all continents except Antarctica). On several of the continents, they’ve formed vast colonies. The so-called ‘California Large’ reportedly stretches almost 560 miles along California’s coast. Over in Europe, meanwhile, there’s one that covers 3,700 miles along the Mediterranean coastline!

If you’re getting antsy just thinking about the sheer size of these groupings, remember that they were once thought to be isolated. Now we know there’s a connection between these super-colonies. What we’re actually looking at is (possibly) one super super colony!........"

COME ON OVER, MEET THE FAMILY

""
Ants from the different super-colonies were matched up against each other, to determine their levels of aggression to each other. It was found that ants from the smaller super-colonies would be as aggressive to one other as always, but those from the main ones (the Californian, larger European and larger Japanese colonies) would not. On the contrary, they engaged in friendly antenna-rubbing ant behavior.

The fact that these little creatures—that had been were separated by thousands of miles—were so friendly is intriguing. The report concludes, “The most plausible explanation is that ants from these three super-colonies are indeed family, and are all genetically related, say the researchers. When they come into contact, they recognize each other by the chemical composition of their cuticles.”

What we’re looking at, in short, isn’t so much a global population as a global community..........."

Quote and photo source:
https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/ant-mega-colony/


I say give them a chance - Certainly could not do more harm to the Earth than Humans, right?

Masters of construction and building and eco-friendly - What more can you ask?

So stop worrying about ET and Alien invasions - With the ants on our side we will triumph!

- AlienView
 
ONE MILLION CANNIBAL ANTS TRAPPED IN SOVIET NUCLEAR BUNKER HAVE ESCAPED!
BY HANNAH OSBORNE ON 11/4/19 AT 8:14 AM EST

A "colony" of up to one million cannibal ants trapped in a nuclear bunker for years have escaped, scientists in Poland have said.

The ants, which had no food source other than their dead nestmates, were first discovered in 2013 were found to be solely made up of worker ants meaning they could not reproduce—how their numbers grew so large was a mystery.

In a study published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research, researchers have now studied the colony to understand how it functioned—and installed an escape route to see if its members would leave their home given the option.

The team, led by Wojciech Czechowski, from the Museum and Institute of Zoology and the Polish Academy of Sciences, were carrying out a survey of bats living in an abandoned Soviet nuclear bunker when they came across the wood ants living in an ammunition bunker where nuclear weapons were once kept. The ants had no access to the outside world and appeared to have come from a nest above that was positioned over a ventilation pipe. When the ants fell down the pipe, they were entombed in the bunker.

However, after returning to the site two years later, scientists found the colony was not only still there, but that it had grown in numbers. This was despite there being no obvious food source, no heat and no light. A population estimate suggested there were hundreds of thousands, if not one million ants living in the bunker.

Full Article:
https://www.newsweek.com/cannibal-ants-soviet-nuclear-bunker-1469573
 
Ultimately, they should have run out of food and eaten themselves to extinction. It's possible they bred really fast and ate their young.
 
How did they breed if they were all soldier ants though?
 
Xanatic* said:
How did they breed if they were all soldier ants though?
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They didn't breed. The population imprisoned in the bunker was replenished the same way it began - by ants falling into the enclosed space from the main colony / nest above.

"The survival and growth of the bunker 'colony' through the years, without producing own offspring, was possible owing to continuous supply of new workers from the upper nest and accumulation of nestmate corpses," the team concluded. "The corpses served as an inexhaustible source of food which substantially allowed survival of the ants trapped down in otherwise extremely unfavourable conditions."
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That explains it!
 
Newly published research indicates black imported fire ants are capable of collective manipulation of sand to effectuate fluid transport - i.e., tool use.
Researchers Observe Sophisticated Tool Use in Ants for the First Time

Researchers have observed black imported fire ants using sand to draw liquid food out of containers when faced with the risk of drowning. This is the first time this sophisticated tool use has been reported in these animals.

A study published in Functional Ecology has shown for the first time that a species of ant has the remarkable ability to adapt its tool use. When provided with small containers of sugar water, black imported fire ants were able to float and feed on the surface, but when researchers reduced the surface tension, the ants started depositing sand grains on the inside of the container leading out of it.

“We found the ants used sand to build a structure that could effectively draw sugar water out of the container to then to be collected,” said Dr. Aiming Zhou, an associate professor at Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China, and a lead author of the research. ...

The sand structures were found to be so efficient that they could siphon almost half of the sugar water out of the containers in five minutes.

Researchers altered the surface tension of the sugar water by adding surfactant. When surfactant concentrations were over 0.05%, representing considerable drowning risk, ants were observed building the sand structures to siphon sugar water out of the container. These structures were never observed when ants foraged in containers of pure sugar water, indicating an adaptable approach to this novel tool use.

The results not only demonstrate black imported fire ants’ ability to use tools to forage but also that they can recognize an increased foraging risk and can adjust their tool use in response to this. ...
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FULL STORY:
https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-observe-sophisticated-tool-use-in-ants-for-the-first-time/

PUBLISHED RESEARCH REPORT:
Ants adjust their tool use strategy in response to foraging risk”
Aiming Zhou, Yuzhe Du and Jian Chen
7 October 2020, Functional Ecology.
DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.13671

Full Article Accessible At:
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.13671
 
EnolaGaia said:
Newly published research indicates black imported fire ants are capable of collective manipulation of sand to effectuate fluid transport - i.e., tool use.


FULL STORY:
https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-observe-sophisticated-tool-use-in-ants-for-the-first-time/

PUBLISHED RESEARCH REPORT:
Ants adjust their tool use strategy in response to foraging risk”
Aiming Zhou, Yuzhe Du and Jian Chen
7 October 2020, Functional Ecology.
DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.13671

Full Article Accessible At:
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.13671
Click to expand...

It's an old trope, but the more discoveries we make about ants, the more they seem to offer a template for what extraterrestrial species could be like.

That's not to say that I expect to find ant-like creatures on other planets, but rather that they might provide hints for how complex yet radically different from humans/mammals their societies could be.

Perhaps if we can conceive of species and societies as radically different from both us and the ants, we might be on the right track.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
Blimey who pissed in your kettle this morning Ryn? :D
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As 'Ryn' has quoted... "they don't retrace their outward bound path, but head back in a straight line." And that, more "attention should be paid to reading into the detail of the story!
"Then it prompts me to question exactly how Ants can go out on a random 'hunt,' then return to their nest in straight lines, when they have not set down a trail to know where their supposed to follow this imaginary straight line?
They can only return in a straight line if they have a straight line (a trail of some form) to follow, surely.

Do pay attention!
 
Certain leaf-cutter ants generate their own 'body armor', sheathing themselves in calcite.
Mineral body armor helps some leaf-cutting ants win fights with bigger kin

A species of leaf-cutting ant has a tough layer of calcite on its exoskeleton, experiments show

Leaf-cutting worker ants might look like they’d be helpless against an enemy soldier ant many times their size. But some of the smaller ants have a secret: Their entire body is coated with a thin but tough layer of mineral armor.

It’s the first time that this type of external, whole-body mineralization has been found in an adult insect, researchers report online November 24 in Nature Communications.

“I found rock ants,” evolutionary biologist Hongjie Li recalls telling his colleague, evolutionary biologist Cameron Currie, when the first experimental results of the hard coating came in. “I can still feel the excitement now,” Li says.

The discovery was serendipitous, says Currie, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who has been studying leaf-cutting ants for more than 20 years. His lab had been examining interactions between ants and their external microbes, which are thought to play a pivotal role in the ants’ farming practices (SN: 4/23/20), when the team encountered a white sheen on the exoskeletons of Acromyrmex echinatior worker ants. ...

Further chemical, X-ray and microscopic examinations revealed a thin layer of calcite containing high levels of magnesium.

To see how protective the armor is, the researchers tested the hardness of the ant exoskeleton by poking armored and nonarmored pieces until an indentation formed. Despite being a mere 7 percent of the overall thickness of the exoskeleton, the calcite coating at least doubles the exoskeleton’s hardness, the team found. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/leaf-cutting-ant-body-armor-mineral-exoskeleton-fight


A species of leaf-cutting ant has a tough layer of calcite on its exoskeleton, experiments show

Leaf-cutting worker ants might look like they’d be helpless against an enemy soldier ant many times their size. But some of the smaller ants have a secret: Their entire body is coated with a thin but tough layer of mineral armor.

It’s the first time that this type of external, whole-body mineralization has been found in an adult insect, researchers report online November 24 in Nature Communications.

“I found rock ants,” evolutionary biologist Hongjie Li recalls telling his colleague, evolutionary biologist Cameron Currie, when the first experimental results of the hard coating came in. “I can still feel the excitement now,” Li says.

The discovery was serendipitous, says Currie, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who has been studying leaf-cutting ants for more than 20 years. His lab had been examining interactions between ants and their external microbes, which are thought to play a pivotal role in the ants’ farming practices (SN: 4/23/20), when the team encountered a white sheen on the exoskeletons of Acromyrmex echinatior worker ants. ...

Further chemical, X-ray and microscopic examinations revealed a thin layer of calcite containing high levels of magnesium.

To see how protective the armor is, the researchers tested the hardness of the ant exoskeleton by poking armored and nonarmored pieces until an indentation formed. Despite being a mere 7 percent of the overall thickness of the exoskeleton, the calcite coating at least doubles the exoskeleton’s hardness, the team found. ...
Click to expand...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/leaf-cutting-ant-body-armor-mineral-exoskeleton-fight
 
Sid said:
"Then it prompts me to question exactly how Ants can go out on a random 'hunt,' then return to their nest in straight lines, when they have not set down a trail to know where their supposed to follow this imaginary straight line?
They can only return in a straight line if they have a straight line (a trail of some form) to follow, surely.
Click to expand...
Invisible elastic?
 
Caught 5 minutes of a BBC Radio 4 programme this morning about how scientists have found that certain fungi can invade ants bodies, taking up 80% of their mass and in effect taking control of their movements and behaviour, without apparently affecting their brain in any way. Anyone got any further information on this?
 
PeteS said:
Caught 5 minutes of a BBC Radio 4 programme this morning about how scientists have found that certain fungi can invade ants bodies, taking up 80% of their mass and in effect taking control of their movements and behaviour, without apparently affecting their brain in any way. Anyone got any further information on this?
Click to expand...
Not a new thing, I was talking about this in my Fortean Fungi talk at UnCon many years ago!
 
PeteS said:
Caught 5 minutes of a BBC Radio 4 programme this morning about how scientists have found that certain fungi can invade ants bodies, taking up 80% of their mass and in effect taking control of their movements and behaviour, without apparently affecting their brain in any way. Anyone got any further information on this?
Click to expand...
Here's the programme website. I meant to post this right away.

Entangled Life by Martin Sheldrake
 
PeteS said:
Caught 5 minutes of a BBC Radio 4 programme this morning about how scientists have found that certain fungi can invade ants bodies, taking up 80% of their mass and in effect taking control of their movements and behaviour, without apparently affecting their brain in any way. Anyone got any further information on this?
Click to expand...

A couple of examples of other parasites that turn ants into 'zombies' are mentioned in:

Parasites & Odd Effects Caused By Parasites
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...fects-caused-by-parasites.37455/#post-1938213
 
Unexpected revelations about Indian jumping ants indicate the queen is a transient - even temporary - status for which the successful candidate morphs its brain and ovaries to assume "office" and from which a reigning queen can "abdicate", reverse the royal physical modifications, and once again become just another worker.
To become queen, these ants shrink their brains and balloon their ovaries (then, they reverse it)

Chosen workers shrink their brains and expand their ovaries to become queens.

Even among ants, royal status is mostly an inherited affair. But for Indian jumping ants, a shot at wearing the crown is worth losing a bit of your brain for — especially as you'll always be able to grow it back later.

Unlike other ant species, Indian jumping ants (Harpegnathos saltator) do not die with their queens. Rather, select females participate in monthlong antenna-boxing matches to decide who gets to be the new matriarch. The victorious female then expands her ovaries and shrinks her brain to three-quarters of its original size.

So far, so bizarre, but scientists have discovered another surreal twist to the storied lives of the forest-dwelling, black-eyed, forcep-jawed critters — If a female is deposed from her queenly throne, she will revert back to being a worker, shrinking her ovaries, regrowing her brain and resuming her previous duties. ...

"We found that their brain returns completely to its previous size within a month after reverting back to a subordinate worker," lead study author Clint Penick, an associate professor at Kennesaw State University, told Live Science. "This was pretty amazing, and it's the first time reversible changes in brain size of this scale have been reported in an insect." ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/ants-shrink-then-regrow-brain-for-royalty.html
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the Indian jumping ants research report. The full report can be accessed at the link below.

Reversible plasticity in brain size, behaviour and physiology characterizes caste transitions in a socially flexible ant (Harpegnathos saltator)
Clint A. Penick, Majid Ghaninia, Kevin L. Haight, Comzit Opachaloemphan, Hua Yan, Danny Reinberg and Jürgen Liebig
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Volume 288, Issue 1948 Published:14 April 2021
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0141

Abstract
Phenotypic plasticity allows organisms to respond to changing environments throughout their lifetime, but these changes are rarely reversible. Exceptions occur in relatively long-lived vertebrate species that exhibit seasonal plasticity in brain size, although similar changes have not been identified in short-lived species, such as insects. Here, we investigate brain plasticity in reproductive workers of the ant Harpegnathos saltator. Unlike most ant species, workers of H. saltator are capable of sexual reproduction, and they compete in a dominance tournament to establish a group of reproductive workers, termed ‘gamergates'. We demonstrated that, compared to foragers, gamergates exhibited a 19% reduction in brain volume in addition to significant differences in behaviour, ovarian status, venom production, cuticular hydrocarbon profile, and expression profiles of related genes. In experimentally manipulated gamergates, 6–8 weeks after being reverted back to non-reproductive status their phenotypes shifted to the forager phenotype across all traits we measured, including brain volume, a trait in which changes were previously shown to be irreversible in honeybees and Drosophila. Brain plasticity in H. saltator is therefore more similar to that found in some long-lived vertebrates that display reversible changes in brain volume throughout their lifetimes.

SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.0141
 
The fascinating case of the 'skull-collecting' ants:

For 60 years, scientists observing Formica archboldi, a species of ant native to Florida, have documented something…odd. The ants’ underground nests are littered with skulls and other body parts, primarily of Odontomachus, trap-jaw ants. Trap-jaws are formidable predatory badasses. F. archboldi are not. So what’s going on? A new study sorts out the mystery — but discovers an even bigger oddity...

Full Article Here:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/pl...-that-collect-skulls-now-we-know-how-and-why?
 
Please don't try this at home.

Police in Somalia have classified a particular kind of ant as a drug, after discovering that people were steaming the insects and inhaling their vapour to get high.

Odorous house ants, whose scientific name is tapinoma sessile, are known to contain formic acid.

There are accounts of birds appearing "drunk" after eating large quantities of these ants, and a security officer has told TV station Somali Cable that humans are deliberately using it to similar effect.

"They cut off the ants' bottoms, then they put them in the pan with the lid on - after it's boiled for a while people sit around and hover over it, and they get high," he says in the clip below.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world...c9b8199db6d5693fa58cf9&pinned_post_type=share
 
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