On this Christmas Day, Americans across the country come together to celebrate the national holiday in their own way. Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus. Agnostics appreciate a day off from work. Myrmecologists dwell on the ants of Christmas Island.
This is the location of Christmas Island:
The staff at The Daily Ant wishes everybody a happy first night of Hanukkah!
After a stunning, 21-year career as a Brazilian footballer, Miraildes Maciel Mota, aka Formiga, has retired from football. It […]
This is a turtle:
Many people around the world believe that turtles are boring.
This is a turtle ant:
Many people around the world believe that turtle ants are fascinating.
Reportedly, one of the turtle ant characteristics that people love most is how they use their heads to block their nest entrances. But these turtle ants may also provide insights into the evolution of worker castes in ants, as shown recently by Dr. Robert Planqué and colleagues in a new study published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
Art is the medium through which humanity communicates its deepest aspirations. It comes as no surprise, then, that examples of ant art can be found in cultures throughout the world and through time, dating back thousands of years. Here’s a look at ant art through the ages.
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.
Blue is a rare color in the biological world. It is particularly difficult for most organisms to produce blue pigment, for reasons […]
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.
The true saint leaves wisdom to the ants, takes cues from the fishes, and leaves willfulness to the sheep.
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.
The Fort Wayne Mad Ants, founded in 2007, quickly reached prominence as a top contender in the minor league, […]
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.
