#ant

#ant

How Honey Ants Store Their Honey, HoneyWhen you are an insect in a colony, you will be assigned a job at birth, and you spend your life fulfilling that job for the good of the colony. After all, they are family. If you are a honey ant, also called the honeypot ant, your one job may be as a storage jar. In a honey ant colony, certain newly-hatched ants are fed and groomed to store sweet nectar from plants. The forager ants collect the nectar in their abdomens and bring it home. They transfer it to a "replete," or storage ant, who then hangs from the ceiling until the nectar is needed, like when prey insects are scarce or the water dries up. Then they can feed the entire colony.If they were bees, they'd built food storage tanks from wax. But the fact that the nectar is stored inside an ant doesn't deter other species from raiding them for that sweet, sweet liquid. These other species include honey badgers and humans. -via Laughing Squid #ant #honeyant #honeypotant

Training Ants to Sniff Out CancerWe were all pretty astonished to learn that dogs, with their advanced senses smell, can detect cancer and other illnesses in people even before diagnostic tools are able to. It turns out that dogs aren't the only animal with such a sensitive sense of smell (like rats who can find land mines), and there are other creatures that are more easily trained to do it. Like ants. Ants are very sensitive to some volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that enable them to find food, avoid enemies, and reproduce. It's not such a stretch to think they could recognize the organic compounds that make up cancer cells. But would they? We think of ants as unthinking soldiers, doing their designated jobs for the group without variance or sense of self-preservation. However, a recent experiment showed that ants of the Formica fusca species can be trained to distinguish breast cancer cells from non-cancerous cells. And quickly!An experiment with ants showed that they can learn this skill in about 30 minutes, and master it in three days. A dog can learn it, too, but it takes months, up to a year of training, and dogs are more expensive to maintain.Okay, how long is it until we replace mammograms with a picnic with ants? It will take time. Training ants is easy compared to cataloging the VOCs of various cancers, and that's a human task. Read more about this finding and how ants might be out future diagnosticians at New Atlas. -via Damn Interesting (Image credit: Syrio) #cancerdetection #smell #ant

Azteca alfari Ants "Heal" Wounds in the Tree They Live in to Repair Damage to Their HomeWhen Panamanian high schooler Alex Wcislo shot a 9-millimeter clay ball through a Cecropia tree, he was surprised to find that, in less than 24 hours, the wound had completely closed up. The patchers were none other than Azteca alfari ants who happened to live in the tree.That incidental finding led Wcislo and his school friends to conduct an experiment where they drilled holes in the trees and observed that the damage was repaired by the ants.This showcases an example of the symbiotic relationship between Azteca alfari ants and their tree dwellings. These ants will often use material found in the plant stem to repair holes left by the toenails of sloths and anteaters, especially if the wound puts the colony's brood at risk. In return, the tree receives antimicrobial secretions around its wound.Wcislo and his friends published their findings in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research.Image:Bruno de Medeiros/iNaturalist#ant #tree #symbiosis

Winners of the Close-up Photographer of the Year 2021The top 100 winners of Close-up Photographer of the Year 03 (2021) or CUPOTY 03 are now featured on its website showing the winners gallery.The Close-up Photographer of the Year website was the brainchild of husband-and-wife duo Tracy and Dan Calder of Winchester, UK. They wanted to put close-up, macro and micro photography on the center stage and be celebrated in its own right.Tracy, a former editor of Outdoor Photography and a features editor at Amateur Photography, has over 20 years experience in the photo magazine industry. She’s also a photography instructor at West Dean College in Sussex, and an author of Close-up & Macro Photography, which has been translated into French and Chinese. Dan is a contributor to Black + White Photography magazine.This year’s Close-up Photographer of the Year (CUPOTY 03) has more than 9000 photos from 55 countries across nine different categories. These categories are insects, animals, plants and fungi, underwater, butterflies and dragonflies, intimate landscape, manmade, micro, and young.From each category, the top three winners were chosen alongside with the other finalists. Here are the top three winners per category.#photography #CUPOTY #MacroPhotography #CloseupPhotography #photographycompetitionInsects

How Ants Dig Long-Lasting Underground Tunnels That Avoid Cave-insAnts are great tunnelers. They can dig several meters underground, and the structures built can last for decades and house millions of these tiny creatures. But how do they do it? To answer this question, José Andrade and his fellow researchers decided to observe some ants in action.[They] set up miniature ant colonies in a container holding 500 millilitres of soil and 15 western harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex occidentalis). The position of every ant and every grain of soil was then captured by high-resolution X-ray scans every 10 minutes for 20 hours.The team found that as the ants removed the soil grain by grain, they formed "arches" in the soil. These said "arches" reduced the forces on the tunnel's surface, which enabled the ants to extend the tunnel without worrying about cave-ins. The researchers believed that ants developed this simple behavioral algorithm through time.“In a remarkable way – in a rather, you know, serendipitous way – they’ve stumbled upon a technique for digging that is in line with the laws of physics, but incredibly efficient,” says Andrade.The researchers believe their findings can have applications in the deadly mining industry.Learn more about this study over at New Scientist.Ants are indeed nothing short of amazing.(Image Credit: Caltech)#Ant #Tunneling #Mining #AnimalEngineering

Floating Fire Ant Swarms Form Tentacles As They Float on WaterWhen fire ants encounter water, they will clump into a floating raft. But the individual ants don't always stick together in a tight blob - instead, some will throw themselves over the edge of the swarm to form tentacle-like protrusions.But why do these individual ants purposely endanger themselves like that?The Smithsonian explains:“[The swarm] is almost like a smart system,” says Franck Vernerey, a soft matter physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the senior author of the fire ant study. “It's flowing by itself, producing those large, long protrusions and retracting them.”Protrusion formation probably helps fire ants search their environment for new ground in a flooded environment, akin to casting a wide net and hoping something catches, says Linda Hooper-Bui, an environmental scientist at Louisiana State University.#ant #fireant #swarm #animalbehavior