On Earth, there are an astonishing number of ants!
There are more ants than mammals, and what is even more frightening is that the total weight of all ants in the world is almost more than the total weight of humans. If ants could organize to form a super colony, they would be the most powerful species on Earth and even pose a threat to humans.
In the kingdom of ants, there are many strange behaviors, and even some ants have begun to live in "slavery", is this the rhythm of moving towards slave society?
Scientists have found that slave ants living in South America actually live by plundering and raising slaves, and they rule like slave owners in our human society. Slave ants are very strong ants, they do not have soldier ants, worker ants, almost all worker ants have become soldier ants. Most of these slave ants are lazy and never build nests, raise young, forage, and clean.
A kind of slave ants called red ants have long lived an "exploitative" life, they are clothed to reach out, eat to open their mouths, lazy, completely lost the ability to live independently. This slave-holding ant would rather starve to death than open its mouth to eat, even if the food is in front of the eyes, the "slave" ants will wait to feed.
So, how do these lazy slave ants who never work survive?
It turned out that slave ants were brave and belligerent. They will wage war, break into the nests of other ants, and plunder the larvae and pupae of other ants to raise them, so that they will eventually become "slaves" to slave ants. The heavy work that slave ants did not bother to do, such as nest building, raising larvae, foraging, cleaning, etc., was done by these captive "slaves".
Due to the short lifespan of the "slave" ant, in order to supplement the "labor force", the slave ant will continue to fight.
Don't underestimate the strength of ants because of their small size. Someone once saw a large rat accidentally break into the camp of ants in Africa, and within seconds, the rat's body was crawling with black ants. After a while, I saw that the bloody rat meat on the ground was continuously transported back to the ant nest. After 5 hours, the big rat that was bouncing around alive was only a skeleton shelf.
And the ant kingdom is not all as lazy as the slave ant, and there is another kind of ant that is very industrious and even learns to "grow" food by itself, which is a leaf-cutting ant living in South America.
Leaf-cutting ants crawl around the leafy trees all day long, and if they catch a fruit tree, they will use their jaws to cut the leaves of the tree, leaving only the bare trunk. So, the growers hated these guys who destroyed the trees. However, leafcutter ants do not like to eat leaves, but instead move the chopped leaves back to the nest, and then use their jaws to repeatedly chew the broken leaves into detritus, pile them into a "mushroom room", and excrete feces on them and use them to cultivate mushrooms.
Soon, a small mushroom will grow in the leaf heap. When the mushroom grows up, the leafcutter ant bites through the top of the mushroom and sucks the mucus secreted from the opening, which is the first dish of the ants. The surface area of the fruiting body accumulates a lot of proteins, which will slowly become viscous, and these proteins are the second dish of leafcutter ants. Interestingly, young female leafcutter ants will pack mushroom fragments in their "sacs" to find a new home for themselves. Female ants plant shredded mushrooms with spores in their new homes, and when the spores germinate, they will grow new mushrooms.
Incredibly, this small mushroom can only be seen in the nests of leaf-cutting ants. Without the help of leaf-cutting ants, they would have been extinct long ago. It seems that leaf-cutting ants can fully apply for "planting patent rights".
Although these ants seem to have mastered many human skills and are surprisingly numerous, there is no need to panic. Because ant colonies are networks, they are reaching a breakpoint, and even slave ants will stop invading. As we have seen, the carrying capacity cannot be changed, and ants will not easily eliminate humans.