ants are cute little balls of love and pincers @loveandpincers - Tumblr Blog

Lady brought this into the office today so I decided to take some pics. Was disappointed when I realized she was missing the mesothoracic leg on one side. As she walked around the coxa and the partial femur continued to move as if she had the full leg - never thought about that before.

#ants

sciencetoastudent

Here we go again, except this time no more (and likely less) than a quarter of them were engaged in this still head-to-head behavior. The rest moved about as normal ants do, even with trails leading away (which I did not see the first and second times).

I am fascinated by this, I’m seeing it all over. This photo was taken yesterday morning at The Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, Utah.

scornet-maestro-blog

crematogaster scutellaris. these are wild ants but i wish to breed them in the future. photo taken in croatia, baska voda

ibiologicalsciences-blog

Army ants: introduction.

One of my ongoing research projects include army ants so i would like to make a brief introduction to that topic.

What are army ants?

The term army ants is used to describe ant species that present specific behavioural and morphological traits.

These traits are:

Obligate collective foraging and group predation. They form aggressive predatory foraging groups called “raids” that gather all the food that they can find.

Nomadism. These ants don’t have permanent nests, instead they form temporary ones called “bivouacs”. The army ants stay in the bivouac for a few weeks and they leave when the queen comes out.

Colony fission. Army ants form new colonies when existing ones divide. Young queens with a group of workers can follow a separate way and become another population. Therefore, queens don’t need their wings to disperse and are wingless. Males on the other hand need wings that help them find another colony and mate with the queen. The workers of the colony decide whether the male will mate with their queen. Thus, it is apparent that the army ants have a unique mating system with sexual selection and polyandry.

The combination of these traits have been referred to as the army ant syndrome (Brady 2003).

The army ants can be divided in two lineages: the New World army ants and the Old World army ants. The main representatives of the New World is the subfamily Ecitoninae, and of the Old World the subfamilies Aenictinae and Dorylinae.

The worldwide distribution of the main army ants subfamilies.

These two lineages were considered to have evolved independently but after the phylogeny of Brady (2003), there is strong evidence that they all shared a common ancestor in Godwana before South America and Africa break up.

Why study army ants?

Army ants have a strong need of food and as a result they are mostly present in tropical habitats. That means that their role in the ecosystem is extremely important and many species assume a role of top predators. So, their importance on the ecosystem is a really interesting aspect to study.

In addition, they can be a model organism to study sexual selection and polyandry, their evolution and the consequences they have in eusociality.

References

Brady, S.G. (2003). Evolution of the army ant syndrome: The origin and long-term evolutionary stasis of a complex of behavioral and reproductive adaptations. PNAS 100 (11): 6575-6579

Franks, N.R., Hölldobler B. (1987). Sexual competition during colony reproduction in army ants. Biol J Linn Soc 30: 229-243

Kronauer, D.J.C. (2009). Recent advances in army ant biology (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Myrmecol News 12: 51-65

hi! if you'd like you can follow "antsrightsactivist" on Instagram! daily posts and lots of ants

I do not have an instagram

#Anonymous