"Alien Ants"
The "fighting people" among the ants understand that they look like aliens, have large heads, good eyesight, and jump like grasshoppers! Even without the queen, it is still "endless and passed down from generation to generation", which can be called the "immortal dynasty" of the ant world!
Ants who have been raising ants for such a long time are often asked: Can ants also be used as pets? What's so nice about this gadget?
Many people's understanding of ants, mostly stay in childhood, grow up tired of livelihood, busy with running, long forgotten those pure happiness, even if just crouch there to spend an afternoon watching ants move, fight.....
Foraging ants
We all know the ant "group", not only the founding "queen" who started from scratch, but also the "soldiers" who are responsible for defending the country, the "workers" who build homes and forage around... But as one of the most evolutionaryly successful species in the world, the world of ants is more wonderful and complex than we can imagine!
You can never imagine that in the ant world, there are "bakers" who can make bread, "farmers" who can graze and grow, "slave owners" who will enslave other types of ants, and even "parachute jumpers" who are keen on extreme sports, etc. The next introduction of the genus of sickle ants not only has excellent vision, but also can jump like grasshoppers, and even jump in mid-air to catch flying insects, which is the general existence of "assassins" in the ant world.
When I didn't know about ants when I was a child, I thought that the queens were like the mother insects in the movie "Galaxy Team", so when I saw the winged ants, I thought they were special soldiers responsible for air raids.
Movie "Galaxy Team"
It is now known that winged ants are either queens (commonly known as princesses who fly unmarried) or ant kings (commonly known as princes who fly unmarried), and some species of queens, like the genus Of Sickle Ants, look like worker ants after they fly off their wings.
Comparison of hunting sickle ant queens and worker ants
Harpegnathos is a small genus distributed in Southeast Asia. As powerful "hunters", sickle ants have excellent vision, and they have more monocular numbers in their compound eyes than any ant, so they can be visually precisely oriented, which is very rare in the ant world that relies on antennal communication and gas positioning!
Hunting sickle ants and jumping sickle ants
The long jaws of sickles can be quickly closed to control prey, and the poisonous stinging needles and jumping ability of the tail make them ideal for hunting fast-moving prey.
Preys on crickets
Sickle worker ants have a powerful paralyzing venom that can permanently paralyze prey without death in a short period of time, so that the prey can be stored for a short time, which is also a kind of hunting wisdom.
Prey on cockroaches
Note: Almost all studies of the ecology and behavior of the genus Sickle are from the Indian species, the Sickle-jumping Ant, so the following introductions are dominated by the Sickle-jumping Ant.
The design of the nest structure of the sickle ant is very complex, dr. Christian Pitts of the Institute of Ecological and Environmental Sciences in Paris, France in 1994. Christiane Petes et al. studied the nests of the sickle-jumping ant and found that in mature populations, the nests consisted of a series of stacked nest chambers that formed an approximately spherical structure, topped by a thick vaulted roof and separated from the surrounding soil by a hollow space. The tunnel leads down to a separate "garbage chamber". Dr. Pitts believes that the nest was designed to accommodate periodic flooding and is common in areas inhabited by sickle-jumping ants.
Nest structure diagram
The small colony of the jumping sickle ant averages 65 ± 40 worker ants, and the large colony can reach more than 200.
As we all know, the colony of ants is centered on the queen, whether it is a single queen system or a multi-queen system, it is necessary to give birth to a princess at the right time, and from a princess to an empress, the difficulty is no less than that of the immortals, which can be regarded as one of the thousands, so the queens that can develop into colonies are definitely "the ant of choice"! The life and death of the queen often determines the survival of the community.
However, most of the genus of sickles do not recognize this reason, and vow to take their fate into their own hands! Worker ants, like the jumping sickle ant, retain their functional ovaries and can mate with the nest within the nest. Once the queen begins to decline or suddenly "dies", the worker ants mated with the nest will actively compete for the right to procreate, and the winner will become "on the throne" and undertake the mission of hatching offspring and continuing the race.
There are also polymorphic ants, although widely distributed and numerous, the queen has never been found, because "the sexual worker ant (Gamergate) can assume the duties that originally belonged to the queen". Truly sat in the jiangshan for thousands of generations, and realized the immortal dynasty! Such a life cycle is not only an unusual existence in the world of ants, but even in the entire biological world, it is unique! In other words, if there are no other accidents, the genus can definitely send away its owner.
Ant colonies
So the world of ants is really too interesting, like the Marvel movie "Ant-Man", combined with the characteristics of different ants, and finally staged a science fiction drama. Treating ants as pets allows you to get a closer look at the life characteristics of different ants, including the every move of these small things inside the mysterious nest.
Movie "Ant-Man"
In fact, raising ants has long been a popular hobby in the world, requiring little space, simple feeding difficulty, and very little consumption..... There is already a very mature experience and supporting equipment. If you have an idea, you can pay attention to it, and in the future, there may be some columns of content about ant breeding, and really look down on the wonderful and magical life in another microscopic world from the perspective of God!
Homemade Metal Nests Homemade metal nests
Finally, with the topic of the hunting sickle ant distributed in the south of our country, let's take an oil poem as the end of this article, and you will laugh:
The Hunting of the Sickle Ant
The hunter leaped through the forest
It is difficult to escape the combination of the sickle teeth
The poison needle of the ant causes paralysis
The Ant Clan class is an Assassin
"Assassin among Ants"