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"Bring science home" all
Written by Seven Kings
This article contains a large number of ant pictures, and those who do not like it consciously retreat!
What kind of food makes Michelin chefs and popular poisonous tongue gourmends praise, let more than 27 million netizens watch, and let david Attenborough, who loves animals, can't help but mouth?
More than 27 million people watched the video of honey ants getting bigger.
This kind of raw food may make Bei Ye overjoyed, so that ordinary people are discouraged, it is a kind of honey juice in the stomach of ants.
Gordon Ramsay, a poisonous tongue gourmand who has tasted it before, says this magical ant honey tastes a bit like a combination of honey, cider and vinegar.
Ramsey tastes honey ants. Image source: National Geographic
René Redzepi, chef at Denmark's two-Michelin-starred restaurant, also posted in 2017 that honey ant honey juice was the best he had ever eaten in the past year.
Reiller Regerdo: Honey ant honey juice is the best thing he's had in the past year. Image credit: reneredzepinoma/instagram
This ant honey juice is also one of the favorite street snacks for children in Mexico. In Mexico City at the end of the 19th century, these small ants were sold in markets, and indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia often ate them as snacks.
So, how to eat ant honey?
The way to eat is to grab one and burst the pulp in the mouth, and you must eat it raw to taste it.
David Attenborough eats honey ants. Image source: BBC
You just need to bite the part where the ant stores the honey juice, and you don't have to headshot for crunching. The small ants after the pulp burst will not die for the time being. Put it back like Ramsey did, and then spit out a wave of verbal excess for the ants.
Of course, civilized people also have a more elegant way to eat, that is, put it on a king-size Western dinner plate, insert the ant head into the meringue so that it is invisible, and then swallow it with a drum.
Honey ant dessert. Image credit: warndu/instagram
What is this magical cuisine?
In fact, this is an ant called a "honey ant", or "honeypot ant".
However, honey ants are not a single species, and several genera can wrap honey juice, such as Myrmecocystus, Prenolepis, Camponotus, Cataglyphis, and Plagiolepis. Southern Africa, Australia, southern America and Mexico all have their own honey ants, such as the Mexican honey ant (Myrmecocystus mexicanus), which is a specialty of the Americas.
In the nest of honey ants, there is a type of worker ant called plerergates, and their job is to be everyone's refrigerator, that is, the kind that is exploded by gourmets.
The process of deformation of honeydew ants in the genus Myrmecocystus.
Honey storage ants can be said to be the coolest working ants, all the work is not moving + non-stop eating! They were forcibly fed honey juice from other students who had gone out to forage for food, and then their stomachs (sacs) of honey swelled.
Although these honey juices are mainly composed of simple sugars like honey, they are not honey, but the nectar of plants, as well as the honeydew pulp secreted by aphids and mesenchymal insects. These honey juices retain their original taste, so that the Michelin chef tastes the taste of everything in the world.
When some workers are hungry, as long as they tap the tentacles of the "refrigerator", the "refrigerator" will open and the honey juice will flow out. This process of mutual feeding, known to biologists as trophallaxis, looks a bit like two small worms sucking on each other. Imagine someone kissing you in the mouth just to take a bite of the overnight meal you spit out.
Worker ants and honey trap ants feed. Image source: BBC
Honey ants were first discovered in 1881, and researchers later unlocked different functions of honey trap ants: in addition to honey ants that store fat house happy water, there are also honey storage ants that specialize in serving as drinking fountains. Honey trap ants also sometimes store the bodily fluids of prey, such as the body fat of wasps, which can be said to be the "small fat meat" walking in the ant colony.
In fact, the invasive species Solenopsis invicta, which has recently been frequently on the news of our country, has honey trap ants. In 1973, researchers discovered that honey trap ants that invaded the red fire ant could store oil. I didn't expect that this ant not only robbed along the way, but also brought its own "fat tissue".
Invasive red fire ant (Solenopsis invicta). Image source: wikimedia
So, how do you become a super cool honey store ant?
Honey trap ants are deformed from the largest worker ants. If the honey trap ants are removed, the largest worker ants in the colony will automatically become honey trap ants.
The size of the worker ants is determined by the amount of food they eat when they are young, and the children who are the most able to cook will become everyone's refrigerator later, and the youngest children will be responsible for taking care of the queen when they are adults.
Honey trap ants are usually hung from the ceiling of ant nests. Image source: wikipedia
It should be pointed out that in peacetime, it is of course very cool to do honey storage ants, but in the disaster year, honey storage ants have become the most dangerous work. This is because the honey ants live in a very harsh environment, they generally live in arid areas with little rainfall, and the presence of honey ants is their adaptation to the environment.
In the event of a disaster, a "tribal" war will break out between honey ants, at which time the honey stored ants will become a strategic material for scrambling. Honey ants from one tribe may be carried to another tribe as "slaves" or headshots on the spot, and their stomachs removed and carried away. And because honeydew ants have little ability to act and resist, their fate depends entirely on whether their tribe is strong enough.
Honey trap ants that have been robbed by other nests. Image source: BBC
In addition, after becoming a honey store ant, it is impossible to transfer to another worker ant, because the change of honey store ants is irreversible.
In contrast to honey ants, there is a strange ant that looks like honey ants and can also store honey juice, but can recover its body. This ant is called false honeypot ant, and The Prenolepis imparis are in this category.
Pseudo honey ant Prenolepis imparis worker ants corpulent, which serve as food storage. Image credit: Alexander Wild, www.alexanderwild.com
After storing honey juice, the body can also restore the prototype and become a worker ant that goes out to work and forage, which is impossible for honey storage ants, so they are called pseudo honey ants. In order to distinguish it from the real honeydew ants, this kind of work with a very elastic stomach is called corpulent.
In addition to the work of honey ants, the children of the honey ant family also have special skills, that is, they can eat children and eat constipation.
Similar to many insects of hymenoptera, honey ants eat "eggs" and their mother's "eggs" when they are young. For example, the worker ants of the Mexican honeypot ant (Myrmecocystus mexicanus mojave) give unhatched eggs to the larvae to eat. Sometimes, for convenience, worker ants will also stick the "next meal" directly to the back of the larvae to facilitate the next feeding. Is it a bit like the story of the "lazy man eating the cake" that the mother made a cake hanging on the neck of the child?
So what is constipation?
In fact, honey ants do not when they are young, and this bubble that gathers the essence of childhood is pulled into the pupa by a drum when they pupate.
The black substance in the body of ant larvae (left) is their pupal. Image source: wikimedia
Poop is not pulled, is this because there is no hand paper?
In fact, this is a unique skill that most hymenopteran insects, such as ants and bees, almost all have - standby constipation. Imagine thousands and thousands of compatriots around you, can this home be clean? So these insects evolved the skill of standby constipation.
Originally, when they were larvae, the "mouth" and "chrysanthemum" were not connected, because their midgut was a dead end, and they would fold tetris in the body but would not eliminate.
Only after pupating, the Ren Dou Second Vein (that is, the midgut and hindgut) between the mouth and the chrysanthemum will be opened, and the bubble will be discharged. This is also called meconium by biologists. The little black dots we see on ant pupae are the essence of their constipation.
Bees are similar, but they are more tolerant, they are after becoming adults and flying, they pull out the first poop of the insect on the first flight. Their flights are also called defecation flights.
In 1981, Alexander M. Haig Jr., then secretary of state, also dismissed the yellow "flight" of bees falling en masse as a biological and chemical weapon of the Soviet Union, a matter that was later debunked by Matthew Meselson, a biologist at Harvard University.
When I was a child, I didn't pull, and when I grew up, I couldn't pull everyone's food out happily, and I learned about the life of such a constipated honey storer ants, and I don't know if humans can still happily eat it?
After being sniffed by humans, honey-storing ants: I just seem to be thinning out...
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Cover source: warndu/instagram
Resources:
https://docs.qq.com/doc/DVFhRdFV0TE9NVlNN
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