Ant researchers have long known that ants swap food and enzymes orally through a process called “trophallaxis” (tro-fuh-lax-is). Ants use a special organ, the crop, as a kind of “social stomach” – many workers eat food only to regurgitate it into larvae. But a recent study has found that this ant spit may serve another critical purpose: communication.

Millions of years before the Wright brothers climbed into their crappy plane, worker ants were already flying around. These ants didn’t have wings. They only had super-powered elastic jaws. Even today, these ants flip through the air, crossing distances greater than 20 times their body length. These ants are Odontomachus.

In an exciting new study recently available online in the journal Animal Behaviour, researchers found that two species of ants are selective in their use of tools for liquid food transport. Although tool use in ants has already established in previous studies, the mechanisms involved in tool use selection have rarely been investigated. Dr. István Maák and colleagues found that ants exhibit selective behavior in tool use, preferring materials that exhibit optimal handling and/or soaking properties. Perhaps most intriguing, the ants learned to preferentially use artificial tools that have superior properties for liquid food transport when compared to tools in their natural environment.

Several human societies adopt nomadic lifestyles. From Yugurs on the Asian steppe to the Beja in northern Africa, these cultures traditionally gather food by tracking changing resources rather than relying solely on stable but geographically restricted food production. Not to be outdone by humans, some ants also exhibit nomadic behavior, most famously the army ants. But in 2008, Volker Witte and Ulrich Maschwitz reported an extraordinary and previously unknown behavior in ants: mushroom harvesting nomadism.