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Scientists
have discovered a species of kamikaze ant in the jungle of Borneo that
blows itself up in a suicide attack in order to save the colony:
Several south-east Asian species of ant in the Camponotus cylindricus group (i.e. carpenter ants) have enlarged mandibular glands that extend into their gaster (the bulbous posterior portion found in bees, wasps and ants). When disturbed, the ants rupture the membrane of the gaster, causing a burst of secretions containing chemicals – the largest gland reservoirs yet known in ants – that immobilize small insect attackers and kills the ant.
Or, as the folks at Newscientist.com put it, “The ants of Borneo go out with a bang, thanks to a body built to blow up during a suicidal death grip.”
In other words, the six-legged blast-ended ant grabs onto the invading enemy and squeezes itself to death, literally blowing itself up and shpritzing a deadly sticky yellow goo everywhere, killing both intruder and ant.
And these little suicide bombers operate on a hair-trigger; their abdomen walls ruptured even when researchers lightly touched them!
Link - via Cliff Pickover's Reality Carnival
Hate
fire ants? Well, the good news is that fire ants have practically been
wiped out in parts of America.
The bad news? They were wiped out by something even worse: the Caribbean crazy ants.
The flea-sized critters are called crazy because each forager scrambles randomly at a speed that your average picnic ant, marching one by one, reaches only in video fast-forward. They're called hairy because of fuzz that, to the naked eye, makes their abdomens look less glossy than those of their slower, bigger cousins.
And they're on the move in Florida, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. In Texas, they've invaded homes and industrial complexes, urban areas and rural areas. They travel in cargo containers, hay bales, potted plants, motorcycles and moving vans. They overwhelm beehives — one Texas beekeeper was losing 100 a year in 2009. They short out industrial equipment.
If one gets electrocuted, its death releases a chemical cue to attack a threat to the colony, said Roger Gold, an entomology professor at Texas A&M.
Think that's bad? It gets worse:
"I did a test site with a product early on and applied the product to a half-acre ... In 30 days I had two inches of dead ants covering the entire half-acre," Rasberry said. "It looked like the top of the dead ants was just total movement from all the live ants on top of the dead ants."
Photo: Alex
Wild
That's an Eciton hamatum soldier ant from the Jatun Sacha reserve, Ecuador, taking a big bite (well, relative to its size) out of Alex Wild's skin. Ouch!
The ant's ice-tong mandibles latch onto the enemy and give her the leverage to use her stinger at the rear end of the ant. This makes her very difficult to remove (notice the mandible buried deep inside the skin).
The soldier caste of Eciton hamatum is similar to that of E. burchellii, bearing the same defensive tusks. Eciton hamatum soldiers, though, have a much larger set of horns along the back corners of the head. These protrusions presumably protect the ant’s vulnerable neck in fights with other ants, and this species certainly spends a great deal more time fighting other ants than does E. burchellii.
Despite the scary look, Alex told us that E. hamatum isn't actually that bad:
If you’ve got an assignment to shoot army ants and your editor neglects to specify the species, I’d hold out for these guys. You won’t get swarmed over, gored, bitten, stung up, or otherwise assaulted anywhere near the amount you suffer by approaching the vicious E. burchellii. [...]
On a personal note, I found photographing this species to be great fun. Most of my Eciton encounters over the years have been with E. burchellii or E. vagans. In comparison, E. hamatum is charming. Their physique is a bit more pudgy, they are an unusual shade of orange, and they are much less aggressive. The effect is almost comical.
Check out more of Alex Wild's fantastic photographs of Army Ants from around the world: Link | Gallery - Thanks Alex!
Be thankful that you don’t live 50 million years ago, or you’d have to use a baseball bat instead of a shoe to kill this ant:
A winged ant queen fossilized in 49.5-million-year-old Wyoming rock ranks as the first body of a giant ant from the Western Hemisphere, says paleoentomologist Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.
The new species, Titanomyrma lubei, is related to giant ants previously found in German fossils. These long-distance relatives bolster the notion that the climate of the time had hot blips that allowed warmth-loving giant insects to spread from continent to continent, Archibald and a U.S.-Canada team propose online May 4 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
We’ve known that ants are social animals like us, but a new study by Noa Pinter-Wollman of Stanford University and colleagues show just how similar they are to humans. Heck, they’ve even got the an social networking system similar to Facebook!
On average, each ant had around 40 interactions. However, around 10 percent of the ants made more than 100 contacts with other ants. Further research is examining just what makes these more social ants different than the others within the colonies.
The researchers compare this type of socialization to that seen on sites like Facebook. While most people have a relatively small number of Facebook friends, there are some with a friends list in the thousands. It is these friends that act as a sort of information hub, spreading information out to a large number of readers. These particular ants are functioning as a large social hub of information.
Killing ants is hard and dangerous work for wasps, so they’ve developed a rather clever method of getting rid of the pesky insect: they airdrop ‘em. Julien Grangier of the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand discovered the strange behavior:
"The first surprise was to see that despite being 200 times smaller, the ants are able to hold their own by rushing at the wasps, spraying them with acid and biting them," Grangier said. "But the most amazing was to observe that wasps, apparently frustrated by having to compete with ants, will pick them up in their mandibles, fly off and drop them away from the food."
The researchers saw the involuntary ant flights 62 times at 20 different bait stations. The wasps didn’t bother to take the ants far, usually dropping them only a few centimeters from the tuna. But that was enough. About 47 percent of the time, the discombobulated ants never made it back to the tuna. Even when the ants did make it back, the wasps beat them there 75 percent of the time.
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The vortex of ants, called the ant death spiral by some, is a circular mill where a group of ants (sometimes hundreds to millions of ants) get separated from the main swarm and ended up following each other’s scent in a circle. It’s called the death spiral because they continue to go in circles until they’re exhausted and die.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | More at The Ant Room
If you want to catch Mother Nature at her best (and if by best you mean bizarre or darned scary), then look no further than how parasites hijack the biology of their hosts.
Take, for instance, the pseudacteon:
Though related to the harmless fruit flies breeding in the world’s neglected fruit bowls, Pseudacteon flies have a far more sinister appetite. The female lays her egg in the body of a living ant, and the tiny maggot will eventually move into the ant’s head to devour its brain. This won’t kill the victim, but will cause the ant’s (technically dead) body to wander aimlessly for days on end, until the ant’s head simply drops off from its body. The maggot will use the severed head as a pupation chamber, transforming into a new fly and finding itself a mate.
Gruesome, eh? Here are 9 more zombie parasites over at TopTenz: Link
"Self-Portrait With Gun" by Chris Trueman
What’s so interesting about the grainy painting above by San Francisco-based artist Chris Trueman? It’s not the image of his younger brother as a little kid in a cowboy outfit holding his dad’s rifle – instead, it’s what he used to paint it: ants. More specifically, 200,000 dead ants.
How does one go about getting 200,000 ants? David Moye of AOL News tell us:
"I found a guy who raises ants and sells them as horned lizard food," he said. "The lizards need the folic acid. It’s an artificial food source. If the lizards were in nature, they could get them from their own diet, but many of these lizards are kept as pets in cities like New York and San Francisco where they are hard to come by." [...]
True to the theme of the painting, Trueman said the idea of ordering the ants was different than when they actually showed up.
"The ants arrived in a large peanut butter jar — just this huge mass of rising ants," he said. "It was weird. I couldn’t set them free. They weren’t native to the area and if they bit someone, they would leave welts, and I couldn’t feed them, so I had to kill them."
Link | Chris Trueman’s Website
A new article released today in the journal of African Inverterates by Alex Wild and Irina Brake details the unusual behavior of a group of kleptoparasitic flies in South Africa. They lay in wait for ants, and mug them, literally stealing food from their mouths!
Last July, while wandering about the coastal forests of St. Lucia in eastern South Africa, I happened across an intriguing scene half-way up a spiny Acacia trunk. Some diminutive gray flies were pestering a trail of ants as they walked along the tree.
The flies’ exact activities were hard to observe with the naked eye, but it looked like nothing I’d ever seen. They seemed to be grabbing ants, pinning them to the trunk, and after a few seconds letting them go again.
The macro lens on my camera serves as a handy field microscope. Conveniently, the flies were so focused on attacking the ants I could place the lens nearly on top of them and observe the details of their activities without spooking them. On inspection, it turned out that the flies were stealing food.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by liquidanbar.
