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Birds have wings to soar the sky,
Free and unrestrained.
However, there are many animals without wings,
But it can also "fly",
Do they ride the clouds?
In fact, they just master a skill.
That's gliding.
Look, the snake is flying in the sky
Among the insects are many flying insects,
The skill is impressive.
And the wingless insects are not to be outdone,
Their gliding skills can also be amazing.
One of the representative insects is the gliding ant.
How can a wingless ant go to heaven?
It feels like the three views are about to be refreshed.
I don't know if you have ever thought about the problem, many arboreal ants living in trees do not have wings, so what if they accidentally fall?
Presumably, ants also have such a concern, after all, once they fall from the tree, the unknown danger they face is likely to kill them.
As a result, many of them have mastered the life-saving skill of gliding. These gliding ants glide back to the trunk of the tree where they live when they fall like a glider.
Gliding ants are currently known to be mainly distributed in three subfamilies, the leafcutter subfamily Myrmicinae, such as Cephalotus atratus, Daceton armigerum, Procryptocerus convergens, and pseudolodivid subfamily Pseudodomyrmecinae, such as Pseudodomyrmex Elongatus and the ant subfamily Foricinae single species Camponotus canescens.
Daceton armigerum
The skill of ant gliding was discovered by chance by Stephen Yanoviak, a professor of integrated biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
To figure out the "story" behind gliding, Stephen Yanoviak and colleagues Robert Dudley and Yonatan Munk traveled to the rainforests of Panama and Peru to study the gliding skills of the black turtle ant Cephalotes atratus.
© StephenYanoviak
The black turtle ant has a broad head and slender hind feet, which is one of the turtle ants.
They are mainly found in the neotropics of Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Panama and Peru.
Goalkeeper Source: www.emaze.com
In the experiment, the researchers gently grabbed the ants with forceps and then let go, and found that about 85 percent of the ants were able to glide and land on the trunk and climb upwards.
To figure out how ants glided through the air, scientists also used cameras to capture the trajectory of ants gliding back into trees.
Experiments have found that they slide off the "J-shaped" route in the air. First, gliding ants will first do free fall for a distance, and as they fall, they use their eyes to find the trunk to land.
After that, like skydivers, they swing their hind feet in the air to turn, so that their abdomen is facing the trunk, and they glide for some distance with the help of the wind.
Before landing, they also rotate 90° so that the head is facing down, facing the trunk, changing from "flying horizontally" to "flying vertically" so that they can safely grasp the trunk and successfully return.
I'm going to fly higher
But sometimes, a single glide may not land the ants safely. They can fall at a speed of 4 m/s, so sometimes ants may be bounced back by the trunk on the first attempt, but then they will turn around 180° and try again.
The rainforest is densely wooded, and the ant is likely to glide back to not its original trees. However, they can track down their companions' pheromones and return to their nests.
Vision plays a very important role in the gliding of ants. Scientists hung strips of cloth of different colors in the woods to observe the ant's choice preferences.
It turned out that the light color, especially white, attracted most of the ants to land, and these ants desperately changed direction, came straight to the strips of cloth, and landed on the strips.
What do you think
Such a flexible gliding ant
Did it hit your heart?
Image source: Pinterest Google Image source see
watermark
S. P. Yanoviak et al.《The role of
visual cues in directed aerial
descent of Cephalotes atratusworkers
(Hymenoptera: Formicidae)》
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