Ants are wonderful creatures. The grains of rice are big, but they are everywhere. Their lives are very different from those of us humans, especially their strange breeding cycles, but we humans can learn something from them.
Although it is insignificant in the case of individual ants, they should not be underestimated when working together as a whole. In fact, they are always intimate and indomitable, so some people think that ant colonies can be called super-individuals (referring to groups of social insects and so on). Ants have an inseparable relationship with insects such as bees and wasps, and may be creatures of the same lineage.
For antologists (scientists who specialize in ants), ants are the one that fascinates them most of all the living creatures on Earth today. Here we have listed the 10 most amazing facts about this wonderful little creature, and I hope you all enjoy the article!
10. Ants as powerful as cattle
As the saying goes, ants can carry up to 50 times their own weight, which is equivalent to a human being able to lift a car! But the truth is, we've been underestimating the power of ants. It has been reported that leaf weaver ants can lift objects that are more than 100 times their own weight even on a handstand! A feat! Now a growing body of research shows that ants in the public domain can carry 5,000 times their own weight at their strong joints. This figure was obtained through gruesome experiments: ants were placed in centrifuges and the centrifugal force was constantly increased until their necks and bodies were torn apart. This result doesn't really prove how much gravity their necks can withstand (astronauts can sometimes withstand a lot of G-pressure, but can't lift the equivalent of G-gravity), but the strength displayed by ants is admirable.
One of the reasons ants have such superpowers is that an animal, the smaller it is, the more terrifying the muscle strength of its body than its weight. The creepy experiment mentioned above may also be because the experiment designed and focused the pressure on the ant's strong joints, and the tiny lumps and bulges on them increase their ability to withstand.
9. Some ants have a symbiotic relationship with plants
Ants have lived on Earth for many years and have gone through vicissitudes (as we will see below). Over time, they have established mutually beneficial coexistence with other species, especially plants. The coexistence relationship between acacia ants and acacia plants is an example of such relationships.
Acacia plants are responsible for providing acacia ants with nests (inside their thorns) and food (i.e., nectar). In return, the ants took on the responsibility of bodyguards, protecting the plant from herbivores and attacking leaf pathogens to keep the plant safe.
Acacia plants are not the only ones that benefit from this, but there is also a carnivorous plant native to Borneo (the old name of Kalimantan), " Nepenthes dinoflora " , which we call an ant plant. These plants provide ants with nests and nectar, while ants are responsible for removing and eating the remaining prey left in the plant's digestive chamber, and the feces excreted by the ants provide additional nutrients to the plants. The beautiful peony flowers also benefit a lot from ants. When the flower is still in its budding stage, the peony flower secretes a type of nectar that attracts swarms of ants to help it blossom smoothly. When the flowers are fully blooming, the ants retreat.
Of course, not all plants are so virtuous, and some plants, like parasites, are directly parasitic to a kind of extension ants at the end of the acacia tree, rather than choosing to establish a mutually beneficial coexistence relationship, which can be said to be a classic example of rogue plants. The abundance of selfish plants allows these ants to gain any benefit from interacting with each other, and in fact, the growth of ants is often hindered by this.
8. The sum of the weights of all ants on Earth is comparable to the weight of all humans
Ants are not a single population species, but a large family of many (more than 14,000) different species, with similarities between the various species. Because of this property, ants have a natural advantage in terms of population statistics (all races of humans are single population species). Ants may be small, but their numbers are enormous. It is estimated that there are at least 1 million ants living around everyone! If you doubt that, you just have to find a relatively warm place and sprinkle some sugar. You may not think there's anything around you, but in a few moments you'll see thousands of ants flocking to collect sugar.
Counting the number of ants is almost a fantasy — most studies of ant numbers have to demarcate a small area beforehand, spray them with insecticides, and then count the carcasses of the ants one by one (a frustrating and time-wasting way of research) and extrapolate the results of the experiments. Experiments like this have estimated that in tropical rainforest areas, the combined weight of all ants is greater than the weight of all local vertebrates combined.
Not only are the numbers of ants huge and difficult to count, but they are almost everywhere. With the exception of Antarctica, they have occupied every corner of the world. Once they find a foothold and establish large strongholds that thrive, their numbers will continue to skyrocket and become a heavy proposition.
7. Humans have learned that ants keep and even enslave other species
What we have long known is that ants are social symbiotics (see image above). However, it has been found that ants also house and enslave other insects. Apart from humans, they are the only creatures that have been found to have this ability. The insects that ants choose to keep are often aphids and mealy bugs. In general, ants will gather several such groups of insects on a crop, driving them around, ensuring that they leave traces in every corner of the crop to produce the most plant sap. Ants, on the other hand, protect them from predators and rain. To prevent these insects from escaping, ants will cut off their wings and even inject them with medicine.
So why do ants do this? The reason is that aphids and other enlisted insects are very efficient producers of nectar or nectar. When ants strike aphids, they stimulate the secretion of insect honeydew. Ants can collect this honeydew as their own benefit.
Some insects are not even satisfied with this, and they raise other species, forcing other ants to become their slaves. They can do this in one or two ways. First, the queen can invade the nests of other queens, kill other queens, and force the worker ants to raise her eggs. Without the queens multiplying, the race of worker ants would have disappeared, so they had to agree. Or they simply invade another nest, steal the larvae, and send them back to their original nests, where they are raised as slaves.
Slave ants are so lazy that if their slaves do not work for them, they will starve to death even if there is enough food. If they were to move out of their colonies, they would also be carried away by slaves. Usually, in such an ant society, each slave ant will have two slaves.
Some ants have mastered this expertise like an agronomist, even breeding and rearing fungi to obtain the "fruit" produced by these fungi for food. Bark beetles, termites, humans and ants are four species known to be proficient in agricultural cultivation techniques. And, at some point in the past 50,000 years, the development of ants has left humans far behind compared to the remnants of human agricultural achievements of the same period!
6. Ants have existed as early as the time of dinosaurs
Fossils of ants have been studied since 1792, and for years it has been thought that ants only gradually appeared about 40 million years ago. But in 1965, some amber unearthed in New Jersey changed our understanding of the evolutionary history of ants. The two ants found in it date back to 92 million years BC. Sphecomyrma Freyi is an extinct ant species, and although their queen and worker ants work separately and this population has an ant-specific posterior thymus gland, they have been found to bear more resemblance to Hu Feng. Also in New Jersey, another ant in amber was found—a fierce ant. It is closer to today's ants than the former, and has a direct evolutionary relationship with many of the ant populations that survive in the tropics today.
Researchers believe that if there had been ant populations so close to modern ant populations 9.2 million years ago, primitive ant populations must have existed as early as 130 million years ago, living, evolving, and evolving alongside Cretaceous dinosaurs, such as Spinosaurus, Triceratops, or Tyrannosaurus Rex. Today is very different, compared to the past, ants play only a relatively small role in today's biosphere, compared to other fossils found 60 million years ago, ants accounted for only one percent of them, but in ancient times their fossils accounted for twenty percent of all insect fossils, and they still live on Earth, which is already amazing. Thanks to the discovery in New Jersey, Cretaceous ants have been found more and more after Canada and Myanmar.
5. Although the ant is small, its power is amazing
Although the ants are small, it is no exaggeration to say that it is not difficult for them to move mountains, because ants can carry an average of 50 tons of soil a year in a square mile. Ants' own abilities can play a good role in their own habitat, but once they enter the habitat of humans, they can cause serious damage. Red Imported Fire Ants is an alien population that thrives in the United States. Initially they were controlled in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and the southeastern United States, but they began to spread to other states.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimates that the cost of repairs, pesticides and control management of the damage caused by these fire ants has exceeded $5 billion, and is expected to cause a total of $750 million in damage to agriculture. Fire ants have severe bites, and are even more fatal for people and animals who are allergic to them. A migratory and foraging fire ant team can extend to any place that seems impossible for them, and together fire ants can build a 100-foot-high "ant ladder."
In fact, it's not just fire ants that can wreak havoc. Bowback ants, commonly known as Carpenter Ants, love to dig up wood, and it's not hard to imagine how terrifying it would be if they built their nests in some wooden frame structures. Crazy Ants, an ant from South America that caused more than $145 million in damage to power lines in the United States, made them household names. The habits and behavior of mad ants are difficult to predict, and they are not only known for their ability to destroy laptop computers or other electronic devices, but they also like to bite the feet of livestock. Controlling such a biological invasion requires repeated patchwork and significant financial wasting.
4. Scouting ants will leave pheromones to guide workers
Ants communicate with their counterparts by releasing pheromones ( a chemical odor ) that secrete these ilfames through special glands throughout the body , while other ants probe and obtain information from them through their tentacles. Interestingly, each independent ant colony has at least twenty different pheromones specific to its own population, each with its own special meaning.
Ant populations have a very detailed hierarchy and division of labor (see below), and some of them are appointed "scouts". The task of these scouts is to wander around the outside of the nest until they stumble upon a suitable source of food. Scouts in the colony must have a very important orientation sensing skill, because once they find the food the colony needs, they must return to the nest in the shortest route and leave pheromones along the way, so that the next food transport line can be more efficient and fast. After the scouting ants leave pheromones, the worker ants can find food along the pheromone line, and as they carry the food to the nest, they also leave more pheromones on the transport route to ensure that other ants do not easily get lost.
3. Ants have two stomachs, and some ants even reproduce asexually
The biological structure of ants is very magical. They have two stomachs, one for storing food to provide nutrients, but they also have another stomach, which is also used to store food, and this stomach is often called the common stomach because it is used by ants to feed other ants. This special evolution allows those soldier ants to stay at their posts while guarding their nests without starving, as other ants can feed them.
There is usually an interesting behavior in the colony, where the worker ants who go out to forage will "kiss" with the ants in the nest and repeat this behavior, regurgitating food from the public stomach to their mouthparts. This is true of all ants, but honeypot ants have evolved a body for feeding each other. Honey Pot Ants workers fill their stomachs with food until their abdomen swells to the point where they can't leave the nest. These worker ants act as food cabinets in the nest, and they feed the other ants in the colony when food outside the nest is scarce. But at the same time, because of the habits of these worker ants, their rich nutrition has also made them predators of other animals and humans.
If the officials think that turning into a food pantry is not peculiar enough, there is an ant that will surprise you. There is an ant species called Mycocepurus Smithii, which has no males in this ant species. Queens can reproduce asexually, and as before, the larvae they produce are also females. Because this method of reproduction has completely changed the way the population reproduces, they have also lost the necessary mating ability of ants in the breeding process. Today they are completely unable to mate, and they are the first species to be discovered that can reproduce asexually. Like farmers, these ants breed a wide variety of fungi, and amazingly, these "crops" can also reproduce asexually. It's a big world, there are no wonders.
2. Ants live in colonies, and the colonies will continue to grow
As mentioned earlier, there are many such tiny creatures in the world whose total biomass exceeds the number of humans currently living on Earth (see above), and there are a large number of different species of ants (including more than 1600 species including subspecies) waiting to be discovered.
These large numbers of ants can open up a large area into their "colony" (which some people may find scary). Argentine ants are a special species of ants, and their distribution is so common that it can even be said that these ants have occupied the whole world. As the name suggests, these ants are native to South America, but are now spread around the world with three super colonies. One colony in Europe has expanded to 3700 miles, the California colony covers more than 560 miles, and there is another large colony in Japan.
Ants can tell if other ants are in a colony by secreting pheromones, so that they can avoid conflicts with ants that have a little "kinship" with them. For a long time, scientists thought that the super colonies of Argentine ants were separated from each other. But studies have shown that they are all interrelated, and even when they are born on different lands thousands of miles apart, Argentine ants still treat each other as family members.
Small Argentine colonies still retain their natural aggression towards each other, so what prompted the formation of their super colonies? No one knows why, but we know how it came to be. Females with reproductive abilities are born wingless and unable to fly in marriage, so they mate with males in the colony, which means that their offspring can blend in with the original primitive colony. Another similar (albeit genetically different) organism on Earth is human.
1. Ants are social insects with a clear division of labor within their groups
Once winged ants have matured, they will fly in marriage. Each male ant can only mate with the queen once and then die, while the queen mates with different males to store enough sperm. After mating, the queen will establish a new kingdom. After settling in the center of the kingdom, the queen will lose her wings and lay eggs for the rest of her life (they can survive for 15 years). By adjusting the fertilization hormone, the queen can decide whether the eggs she lays will produce male or female ants. Fertilized eggs develop into female ants, while unfertilized eggs develop into male ants. By adjusting nutritional rations, the queen can also decide whether the female ants that are born will develop into reproductive females or worker ants.
Almost all of the first eggs laid after marriage are inanimate worker ants, whose job it is to build and expand their nests.
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