The Daily Ant
Myrmecology Dies in Darkness
Category: Reports
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Have you ever been stung by a fire ant? Even if you haven’t, you probably know how (supposedly) bad and evil fire ants are. Yet fire ants, and a couple other well-known invasive ant species like Argentine ants, are only a few out of about 13,000 known species of ants, and they give all of…
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As regular readers of The Daily Ant know already, ants harbor lots of bacteria. A growing number of studies are revealing that we should investigate these microbial communities, and their associations with their hosts, in order to fully understand the ecology and evolution of ants. In pursuit of this goal, Manuela Ramalho and colleagues just published an interesting study…
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So, you have some communities of ants. You notice that some communities are more diverse than others. In one community, certain species of ants are more common, while in another, different species are more common. How can you explain this coexistence and variation? Dominance hierarchies, perhaps? Dominance hierarchies have played a key role in ant ecology…
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Anyone who is a human living in a human society knows that social life carries with it the risk of catching a disease from other nearby humans. Of course, this is also the case for ants in their societies. But a fascinating paper in Ecology and Evolution has recently revealed another commonality: some wood ants, like humans, create…
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In our recent Philosophy Phriday interview with UNC philosopher Ram Neta, Dr. Neta expressed surprise at the fact that ants have brains. But ants do indeed have brains, as certain fungi know very well, and in a study recently accepted in Developmental Neurobiology, Dr. J. Frances Kamhi and colleagues set out to understand how ant brains…
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[UPDATED with a video, below] Some researchers recently published a study in which they placed Cataglyphis desert ants on treadmills. Check out a discussion of the research here. Update: In response to a comment by Boshua J’lanchard, here is a video of the treadmill in action:
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Many research programs in biology neglect natural history. While investigating sophisticated hypotheses and theories, even very basic information about study organisms remains unknown. This is why a recent paper by Dr. Walter Tschinkel and Daniel Domínguez is so exciting. These researchers, as reported in PLOS ONE last week, photographed and identified most of the seeds…
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Meet Sophie Schofield, Dr. Tom Bishop, and Dr. Kate Parr: These three ant researchers wanted to know how drastically different environments impact functional traits in ants. So, they found out, and published their discoveries in Myrmecological News in September of last year.
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Every living thing needs nutrients. Much previous work has shown that a variety of soil nutrients – in particular Nitrogen (N), Phosphorous (P), and Potassium (K) – greatly impact plant communities. Often, human behaviors, especially agricultural practices like fertilization, have generated significant shifts in these nutrients. When environments become flushed with these nutrients, overall biomass typically increases…
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Six days ago, we featured a story about ant butts. Five days ago, we featured a quote from a book by Ed Yong. Today, we feature an article by Ed Yong about ant butts: check it out!
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On Thursday, Field Correspondant Natalia Piland, who is currently undercover as an evolutionary biologist studying birds in Peru, provided The Daily Ant with crucial insight into local ant-human relations. Piland found a beautiful specimen of an ant (beautiful as all ants are beautiful): What is this? It is a leaf-cutter ant queen! But what is most interesting is…
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Perhaps the most widely-appreciated characteristic of ant colonies is their propensity for collective decision-making. How does a colony, with behavioral variation across individuals, optimize their collective choices? Thomas O’Shea-Wheller and colleagues at the University of Bristol decided to find out. What they discovered may surprise you. In short, their first finding is that individual ants in the species Temnothorax albipennis tend to…
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