Ants, which have always been considered to be the "weakest" creatures in the world, are often described as simple to deal with a certain person, and like to use the metaphor of "as simple as crushing an ant", but a discovery by scientists has changed our understanding of ants.
Scientists have found a coating of magnesium-rich calcite on the exoskeleton of a leaf-cutting ant in Central America, which looks like the ore armor of leaf-cutting ants, and this "armor" can not only help them resist external physical attacks, but also have the effect of resisting bacteria, just like a piece of armor that can resist both physical damage and magic damage.
In the past, only calcium-containing minerals have been found on animal teeth, and mineralized components have been found in some crustaceans, such as crabs and shrimps, but there has never been a similar discovery in any kind of adult insect.
crab
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" leaf-cutting ant >: an ant in the "farming era"</h1>
Leaf-cutting ants, as the name suggests, are a kind of leaf-cutting ants, they cut leaves in addition to drinking the sap inside the leaves, more importantly, the chopped leaves as nutrients, moved back to the cave to feed the fungi, and then the fungus that grows out feeds the larvae.
Leaf-cutting ants are similar to other ants, including queens, worker ants, and soldier ants, and their external forms are also different. The queen is the largest, the soldier ant is good at war, the head is larger, the palate is developed; the worker ant is the smallest type in the group, responsible for the size of the ant kingdom.
In fact, according to the size and age of the worker ants, there are also different divisions of labor, such as the smallest type, classified as mini ants, mainly responsible for taking care of the "fungal farm" in the ant nest, and the larger medium-sized ants are mainly responsible for going out to chop and carry leaves.
But sometimes mini ants are also involved in the handling process, lying on the leaves carried by medium-sized ants to "hitchhik", but they are also responsible for safety during transportation and checking whether the leaves are contaminated by other harmful fungi. Of course, mini ants sometimes suck a few mouthfuls of leaf sap during the "free ride".
Leaf-cutting ants have an interesting lifestyle, as they developed a "farming" production method as early as 60 million years ago.
Leaf-cutting ants' nests have one or more large areas of leaves that they carry in, and over time, "mushrooms" grow on top of the leaves.
In fact, these are not real mushrooms, but fungi, and these fungi are the food of leaf-cutting ants. Therefore, people also call the place where leafcutter ants cultivate fungi as "fungal farms".
Because leafcutter ants need a large number of leaves to feed the fungus, leafcutter ants are also considered an agricultural pest in some parts of South America that destroy the leaves of crops.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > significantly enhanced defenses</h1>
Leaf-cutting ants are one of the most thoroughly studied insects, but this is the first time that "ore armor" has been found on their bodies.
This layer of "armor" is made up of thousands of tiny flaky crystals attached to the exoskeleton, which can play a good role in protecting the body and limbs.
In order to study what the role of leaf-cutting ants' "ore armor" is, Li Hongjie, a researcher at Ningbo University in China, and other scientists have done several experiments, first extracting from the ant colony when the ants are still pupating, and then cultivating them in some specific environments, so that when they grow up, they will not grow mineral layers, so that scientists can get leaf-cutting ants that do not contain "ore armor".
In one of the experiments, the scientists fought leaf-cutting ants that normally contain "ore armor" and leaf-cutter ants without armor against a large but close-knit ant.
It was found that after more than an hour of fighting, those leaf-cutting ants that did not contain "ore armor" lost 3 times more body parts, such as limbs, than leaf-cutting ants containing armor, which can show that this layer of "ore armor" with high magnesium content has a certain anti-physical attack ability and can protect leaf-cutting ants from less damage in the "ant war".
In another experiment, the scientists exposed two groups of leafcutter ants to a pathogenic fungus that can infect leafcutter ants and cause death.
After 6 days, scientists found that about 50% of the leaf-cutting ants containing "ore armor" died, while the leaf-cutting ants without armor were all dead. It can be seen that this layer of "ore armor" can not only resist physical damage, but also "magic damage" such as fungi.
In addition, scientists have also found that this layer of biological minerals can also enhance the hardness of the exoskeleton of leafcutter ants, that is, ants with armored layers, and their exoskeleton hardness is higher than that of ants without armor layers.
< h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the older you are, the stronger your armor</h1>
As it ages, the layer of "ore armor" on the leafcutter ant will also increase, and the stronger its protective ability will be. Young leaf-cutting ants generally stay in their nests to take care of the "fungal farm", have few opportunities to go out, and naturally do not fight with other ants, so naturally there is no need for additional protection.
In addition, not going out means that the lower probability of contracting some harmful fungi, then their need for armor is much lower. Of course, young leaf-cutting ants do not need too much "ore armor", which is also related to their work.
Leafcutter ants do not eat all fungi, but the leaves inside the "fungal farm" will grow some useless, even harmful, fungus because they have been "contaminated" by the fungus they bring in from the outside. To deal with such situations, leafcutter ants have evolved a "symbiotic" model.
The general principle is that some symbiotic bacteria, such as streptose bacteria, will attach to the skin of young worker ants, and then when young worker ants crawl through the "fungal farm", streptomyces will secrete some antibiotic-like chemicals to kill foreign fungi, but will not harm the fungus needed by leafcutter ants.
As mentioned earlier, the main job of young worker ants is to take care of the "fungal farm", so if the body is covered with thick "ore armor" and there is no bare skin, it is naturally impossible to form a symbiotic relationship with such bacteria.
Leafcutter ant's "fungal farm"
If properly managed, the "fungal farm" will continuously deliver grain to the entire ant kingdom, but once abandoned, it will grow bacteria, and after the hyphae over-multiply, it will consume a lot of oxygen, resulting in some ant larvae suffocating to death, and even causing the destruction of the entire ant colony.
But sometimes some "fungal farms" have to be abandoned, and in order to manage these abandoned "farms", leaf-cutting ants have developed a special "waste management" method to throw away these farm wastes.
Abandoned "fungal farms" sometimes grow some harmful molds, which not only pollute their food, but also have great harm to leaf-cutting ants themselves, so the ants that work as waste disposal are usually some elderly worker ants and some useless leaf-cutting ants.
They sort the moldy leaf fragments, pile them up, and then carry them to the outside of the nest, the whole process has a greater risk of infection, so the protective role of "ore armor" is very necessary. But "ore armor" is not an absolute defense, and there are still a large number of worker ants dying in the waste heap of the "fungal farm".
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