Ants Rescue Their Brethren Trapped in a Spider Web

Despite being many in numbers, ants still value the life of each of their brethren. When one of them gets trapped in a spider web, its comrades immediately go and rescue the unlucky ant.

Veromessor pergandei harvester ants, which thrive in colonies tens of thousands strong in the southwestern United States, usually walk a single route each day to collect seeds. Christina Kwapich and Bert Hölldobler at Arizona State University in Tempe monitored the ants’ response when one of their own became ensnared in a spider web.
If the entangled ant released a chemical alarm signal, its companions rescued it, carried it back to the nest and cleaned the silk from its body. Ants also tugged on the web itself until they had destroyed it. In laboratory tests, ants needed between 30 minutes and 2 hours to demolish a single web.

(Image Credit: C. L. Kwapich)


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