This article is provided by the public account "Bring science home"
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Big friends and children, have you observed the ant march?
Ants seem to be collectively active. What if one day an ant gets lost? What happens to it?
The biology teacher may tell you that ants leave chemical marks on the road when they are marching, and if you wipe these marks off, the ants will become blind and will never find their way home. Is this really the case?
In fact, ants are also divided into many types, some ants use external hormones to communicate, and some ants communicate with other means. Some ants do leave exohormonals on the route of the march. But there are also many ants that do not use this method.
In fact, although many ants leave chemical marks on the way to marching, exosteroids will slowly decompose under natural conditions and are not suitable for use as road signs on long roads.
And many ants leave traces of exohormonal hormones on their way home after finding food. This illustrates 2 things, first of all, the use of external hormones may be to mark the orientation of food, rather than to mark the direction of home. Second, ants already know the way home before they are labeled with external hormones.
If exohormonals aren't the only signposts, how do ants get home?
If you're a lost ant, apart from being eaten by predators, what kinds of endings await you?
Ending 1 Ant Ghost Hits the Wall
If you and a cluster of friends get lost on the march, sometimes the leading ant will hit the tail of the team in a daze and think that they have found a large force.
In this way, your group of lost ants will become a closed circle, and they will continue to circle in this circle until everyone ends up hollowing out and exhausted and dying.
This kind of circle formed by lost ants is called ant mill.
The ants in the circle are so miserable, right, your heart may be shouting all the time:
Why haven't you come home yet!!! Why is the scenery here the same as it was 1 minute ago!!!
This may be the most terrifying nightmare in the ant world!
Outcome 2 Change of name and surname to join other families
Ghost needle swim ants
Don't worry, the scariest things don't have to happen every time.
If you're a marching ant like Eciton, sometimes you'll blend in with other colonies. For example, if you have no queens in your colony, or if you lose them while out foraging, other colonies may accept you.
So you might be able to change your surname, join another ant colony, and join another queen.
However, this situation is still quite rare, because the genes of lost ants and new colonies are relatively similar, and this can only be done. If you are not of my race, your heart will be different. We'll talk about that below.
Ending 3 Touching the sister's ass successfully returned home
Cut-breasted ants track and run
As we just said, many ants do not rely on external hormone road signs to identify the way.
If you're a Temnothorax, you'll be taken by a sister to the food location, and the way you do before and after is called tandem run.
Specifically, your sister walks in front of you, stop-and-go, and when you touch her ass, touch her and keep going until the food is there. In this way, you also know where to go to eat.
For the convenience of research, it is painted as a colorful cut-breasted ant
However, if you lose it, then the leading sister will go around in a big circle to find you. If you can't find it, you will scatter to find your way home, and when ants find their way home, they will notify other ants. So you'll be taken home by the other sisters — by touching your ass.
Ending 4: Go home like a man
Big-eyed ant Gigantiops destructor
Some ants have very strong vision, such as a large-eyed ant (Gigantiops destructor) whose eyes look like a praying mantis can see things in the distance. They mainly rely on vision to navigate, that is, they are similar to humans, relying on their eyes to recognize the way.
So if you're this kind of ant, as long as you can see where home is, you can find your home.
Ending 5 Count the steps and walk home
Two-colored arrow ants
If you're a Cataglyphis bicolor desert ant in the Sahara, your sense of direction will make many road-fooled human dipteras blush.
As we all know, the Sahara Desert is very hot, and the external hormones evaporate as soon as they are roasted in the desert, so you must have special navigation skills, not only relying on external hormones to navigate.
When you're foraging, you'll make a big circle. But the strange thing is that when you go home, you are like a math teacher possessed, and you can walk straight back to the ant nest.
A long-legged desert ant whose eyes are painted with yellow paint
If you're a cataglyphis fortis living in the Tunisian desert, you can march 100 meters in the empty desert and get lost. This is equivalent to a human two-legged beast without any navigation tools, intuitively going to the desert for 20 kilometers, and then returning in a straight line. And also take into account that on the return trip, the footprints in the sand may have long been blown away by the wind.
These desert ants don't find their way home by sight. Because scientists once painted their eyes (in a frenzy), but they managed to get home.
The most plausible explanation is that they keep a number of steps.
(heart-wrenching) experiments that prove that long-legged desert ants can count steps
When the ants were about to go home, the scientists used pig hair to add a set of stilts to some long-legged desert ants, and sawed the legs of other ants short. Scientists speculate that if ants go home by counting their steps, then change their leg length and they will go over the top or not get home.
Amputated legs (left, good heartache), stilted (middle), and normal long-legged desert ants
As a result, the ants with stilts did pass by, while the ants whose legs were truncated did not come home. This is perfect proof that these ants go home by counting steps.
Ending 6 Your family doesn't know you anymore
Your mom doesn't want you anymore!
Ants are coated with an oily substance called CHC (hydrocarbon), which is equivalent to your family's body odor family crest.
Of course, this CHC body odor is determined by your genes and the nest you are in, so your family members rely on this body odor to distinguish whether you are your own person or not.
If you wander outside for too long to find your way home, the "smell of home" on your body may be completely lost, and the ants in your hometown may treat you as an outsider and drive you out of the house...
Imagine that you are chased out of the door by your mother because you have no "taste of home" on your body, and it is really a bit miserable.
×××
Therefore, it is still difficult for ants to get lost. The lost ants you see may just be looking for other partners or looking for food.
Assuming that none of the above endings hold, what if an ant is really lost?
Ultimate Ending-1 Continue to work – until the end of your life
In fact, as a lone ant, you may not need a lot of energy and food to survive. Nor can you generate an ant colony on your own. So you're likely to be carrying food and stop-and-go, heading in what you think is home, and keep going like that...
Sounds sad, but that's what it means to be a worker ant isn't it?
Someone once discovered something like this.
An anthill with a large pit dug out below
Some wood ants opened a tunnel to an abandoned underground military bunker, and then a large number of worker ants fell into it one after another. After falling in, the worker ants still worked diligently, building an anthill that was the same as the one on the ground. However, in this underground chamber, it was dark and cold, and there was almost no food, and no queens bred new worker ants, so the worker ants there eventually starved to death.
Finale-2 is carried to ant cemetery
Don't be afraid, if you die, there will be sisters who specialize in ant funeral industries who will find you through your smell.
Because as social insects, ants have the habit of transporting the corpses of the same kind to designated places.
But don't be too happy too soon, your sisters are not going to hold a funeral for you, but to throw you into a landfill-like place or carry you directly into the food pantry.
Later your arms may be used as building materials, or your sisters may use your thighs for dinner, which will save them the trouble of foraging for food. What kind of outcome your body will encounter, scientists are still studying.
Get down, Pikachu!
One thing is more certain, though, that your sisters found out through your smell that you were no longer in the "ant" world.
Some people say that you smell "oleic" - usually bees and ants will make this smell when they are dead and rotten.
Some people say that you who are dead don't smell the same as before. For example, if you're an Argentine rainbow stink ant, your sisters will find that you don't have body odor anymore — and if you don't stink, it means that your death date has come.
Ant corpse stinks – the discovery of oleic acid
Entomological titan Edward Osborne Wilson observed a peculiar phenomenon in the 1950s.
Ants that have just died are not immediately spotted by nearby companions. It is not until 2 days later that their companions find them and carry them away.
Wilson guessed that the rotting ants were emitting a distinctive smell that attracted the other ants.
After some experiments, Wilson believed that oleic acid was the smell emitted by dead ants, and ants relied on this chemical to determine whether their companions had hung up. To test his conjecture, he did an experiment with the madman Х2.
He applied oleic acid to a live ant and observed the six-legged kicking ant forcibly carried away by his companions and thrown into the ant cemetery.
It was so miserable that its companions only recognized the taste and did not recognize people. Wilson proved through this "living dead" experiment that oleic acid is the key chemical that ants use to judge whether their companions are alive or dead.
"Let go of me, I'm not dead yet!"
Afterwards, a curious Wilson continued to observe the "zombie" ant. It took the poor guy about 1-2 hours to finally clean himself up and go home.
Fortunately, you are just an ordinary human being, and if you are lost, you can also fight demons!
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Bring science home ID: bringsciencehome
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Resources:
Parpinelli, R.S., Lopes, H.S. and Freitas, A.A. (2002). Data mining with an ant colony optimization algorithm. IEEE Trans. Evol. Comput. 6: 321-332.
www.pnas.org/content/106/20/8251.abstract
ResearchBlogging/Dave Munger, forbes, gizmodo, npr.org, wikipedia
Image credits: clipart panda, Wojciech Stephan, phys.org, giphy, 4gif, quora, reddit, gifsoup, pinterest, wikipedia, etc