Amazing Ants / Phenomenal Formicae

[maximus otter]

Ants Making Strange Petal Circles Around Dead Bees

A post on Twitter showing circular arrangements of flower petals placed around several dead bees by ants recently went viral. With an apparent “bee funeral” taking place, it’s easy to see why, but there are actually several reasons why ants may process dead insects like this – and unfortunately, none of them pertain to giving the bees a dignified send-off.

Ants live in complex colonies and use a variety of pheromones to communicate. This can be for a walking trail, to alert other ants of danger, or even just to let them know they’ve died and everyone else should probably watch out for dying, too.

It figures, then, that they’d be sensitive to the chemical signaling of other animals. In the case of these dead bees, it’s not known why they died – but their corpses are likely sending the ants some kind of message, and so it’s possible their floristry is a response to this.

If the bees represent a few sizable meals for these ants, the decaying plant material may act as a mask to keep their feast hidden from competing scavengers who may be on the prowl for a free lunch. The arrangement would therefore be less of a funerary practice and more like hiding takeout leftovers as a UFO (unidentified foiled object) in your dorm fridge to stop prying roommates from eating them.

Alternatively, the signals emitting from the bees may have signaled to the ants that they need to tidy up a bit. Ants are famously good cleaners and will practice something known as necrophoresis to keep their colonies healthy.

Squashed ants will sometimes attract more ants (one of many reasons why you shouldn’t squish them) because their bodies emit oleic acid. As an adaptation that lessens the spread of pathogens, necrophoresis sees the ants gather their smelly dead and carry them away to a dedicated tomb. Some colonies even have specialized undertaker ants for the job.

It’s possible that the bees in this video were collected through a similar mechanism, and that the mask of a floral blanket could reduce the likelihood of the decomposing heap attracting unwanted attention.

https://apple.news/A1Jv7J-aSSvqlhWYRaTqdEA

maximus otter

 

[ramonmercado]

An ant census.

Counting ants is a bit like counting grains of sand on a beach. But six researchers have proved they were up for the task. They’ve come up with the latest—and most comprehensive—estimate of the number of ants in the world: 20 quadrillion. That’s 12 megatons of biomass—more than all the wild birds and mammals taken together.

Ants are important ecosystem engineers, moving dirt, distributing seeds, and recycling organic matter. There has been some research to see how ants are distributed around the world, but there was no global estimate of how many there are.

So for the work, researchers combed through 12,000 reports from databases in many languages, including Bulgarian and Indonesian, finding 489 studies with rigorous enough methods of collecting and counting ants to be included. Most of the studies were not focused on ants per se but on larger questions of biodiversity and evolution and just happened to sample ants. The team was surprised to find how concentrated ants are in the tropics, being most plentiful there in savannas and moist forests.

The new estimate is two to 20 times higher than previous ones, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But is likely more accurate, the authors contend, because it is the first “bottom-up” effort that relied on actual counts of ants caught around the world.

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-many-ants-live-earth

 

[ramonmercado]

Giant ant fossils. But why so big?

More than 47 million years ago, giant carnivorous ants swarmed the prehistoric forest floors of North America looking for prey.

'Giant' is no exaggeration either. Some ancient colonies that lived in what is now the state of Wyoming were ruled by queens the size of hummingbirds.

Those aren't even the biggest ants to ever stride across Earth's surface. The largest known ant queen to have ever lived was a relative found in fossil form over in Germany. She had the body mass of a wren, was more than 5 centimeters (2 inches) long, and had wings that extended 16 centimeters. Her army of workers is thought to have hunted anything in their wake, including perhaps lizards, mammals, and birds.

Like modern ants, these ancient insects were more than likely ectothermic, meaning they struggle to survive without an appreciable amount of heat in their environment. Just how far the temperature can drop before they fail to thrive largely depends on their body size.

While animals that can modify their own temperatures withstand colder climates by maximizing their mass and minimizing their skin, animals that need to absorb heat from their environment do better with more surface area and less volume. Today, bigger ant queens are found closer to the tropics, for example.

The fossil of an extinct giant ant from Wyoming against a hummingbird for size. (Bruce Archibald)

So how did ancient giant ants cross the cold Bering land bridge that once connected Russia to Alaska to get from Europe to Wyoming?

In 2011, researchers suggested that this temperate land bridge once included a climate-controlled 'gate'. During brief periods of global warming, that gate may have swung open to allow cold-blooded organisms, like ants, to comfortably pass from one continent to another.

A newly discovered fossil of an ancient ant queen now complicates that hypothesis. ...

https://www.sciencealert.com/fossil...e-challenging-what-we-know-about-insect-sizes