The Daily Ant
Myrmecology Dies in Darkness
Category: Reports
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As the classic public service announcement goes, “If you see something, say something.” But adherence to this precept clearly generates a problem: if you don’t see something, you won’t say something! It is perhaps because of this mental framework that subterranean ants have received such little work in the scientific literature, compared to their aboveground…
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Avid readers will remember our article “Feeling Blue? So is This Ant“, in which we featured a beautiful blue ant. Today, we add another ant to our color wheel: This queen is not green with envy, but green with being Oecophylla smaragdina, a widespread species of weaver ant. Why is it green? Who knows!
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We all know how ants forage for food. A bunch of workers are sent out randomly, then, upon finding some delicious munchie, each worker lays a chemical trail back to her nest in the hopes that other workers will follow suit. Whether or not nest mates do in fact reinforce a given trail is dictated…
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Sometimes, The New York Times is depressingly anti-ant. Other times, it produces excellent ant-friendly content such as this video recently sent to The Daily Ant by Comic Correspondant Matt Hernandez and Field Correspondant Ana Rita:
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Ants are all kinds of smelly, and a recent study in PNAS advances our understanding of the molecular and genetic bases of these smells. See here for Vanderbilt University’s coverage of the study, and enjoy the below video produced in concert with the study’s publication. Thanks to Coffee Correspondant Ciara Reyes for bringing our attention to this study!
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The reproductive system of most ants is pretty freaky, by human standards. Unlike in our species, where all individuals have a diploid set of chromosomes, nearly all ant species utilize a “haplodiploid” system in which females are diploid and males are haploid, with only one chromosome for each chromosomal site. So, in order to produce…
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This is an extrafloral nectary: Extrafloral nectaries, or “EFNs”, are little sources of sugar and nitrogen produced to entice ants to visit host plants. The plants, in return, enjoy the significant defensive capabilities of the ants, which often repel herbivorous insects. Given this benefit, it is perhaps not surprising that many different plant species and…
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Termites are not ants. Yet, in also being eusocial, termites exhibit several behaviors that resemble ants, such as foraging for food via chemical trails. Termites and ants are also natural enemies, and several ant species are specialist predators of their distantly-related insect cousins. But how do the ants track their prey? A study recently published…
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This week was an odd one. It featured Theatre Thursday on Wednesday, Philosophy Phriday on Thursday, and an endorsement of ants by a key public defender of James Comey the same week the latter testified before Congress (oh, and that was weird too). So, we’ve decided to continute the oddity with a special edition post…
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On Monday, a neat new study was published in Myrmecological News. This study, by Dr. Eduardo Gonçalves Paterson Fox and colleagues, tracked the development of trap-jaw ants and produced some sweet SEM images of the ant babies. One of the authors, Dr. Adrian Smith, also produced a nice video where he explains this study to teenagers. Enjoy!
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Polydomy. It’s a thing. It’s a thing where a single ant colony occupies completely separate nesting chambers rather than a single nest site. Polydomy, in creating a more distributed nest structure, has been theorized to increase foraging efficiency and enhance acquisition of a more diverse set of resources. Yet, despite the prevalence of hypotheses and theoretical work relating to…
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Fungus-farming ants (the “attines”) are one of the most widely recognized groups of ants, particularly in the form of leaf-cutter ants. They even feature prominently at the beginning of the best classic Disney movie, Ant Lion King:
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