Ants - an Amazing Species

Ants are a very interesting species, dating pack from prehistoric times. In fact, a team of researchers from the American Museum of Natural History announced recently the discovery of the oldest fossil ants ever found. The extremely rare 92-million-year-old ants are preserved in amber from a location in New Jersey that has produced some of the world's most important amber-encased fossils. The new specimens are 50 million years older than the most ancient fossils that were previously clearly recognized as ants; the find thus proves unequivocally the existence of ants back into the Age of the Dinosaurs.

Ants are very diverse and it is difficult to generalize about them, however, there are some basic similarities. The body of an ant is clearly divided into three sections: the head, the thorax, and the gaster.(The narrow waist is actually within the abdomen, so the part of the abdomen behind the waist is called the gaster.) The waist can be made up of one or two small segments, depending on the species. Ants tend to come in dark or earth tones. Different species are black, earth-tone reds, pale tans, and basic browns. Ants are social insects living in colonies comprised of one or a few queens, and many workers. The queen generally stays deep and safe within a nest. Most ants that you see are workers and these are all females. Depending on species, workers may be similar in size, or come in a range of sizes.

There are many species of ants. Most ants are generalists, eating a variety of small insects that they capture, dead insects they happen to find, nectar, or honey dew. They need a balance of carbohydrates and protein. Protein is especially needed for the queen to make eggs and for the larvae to grow.Their favorite food varies according to the species. Sweet foods are very important for worker ants as sources of energy for outputting power and the protein of insect bodies is an important material for building up the ant's body. The ant carries sweet liquid food (such as honey) by sucking it into its crop. When the crop swells, the membrane between the abdominal membrane is stretched to produce a large striped abdomen. When the honey is shared with other ants after returning to the nest, the crop is emptied and the ant leaves the nest again to look for more food.Ant's also very much enjoy eating other insects. Some garbage-clearing ants remove the residual insect exoskeletons from the nest after the flesh is eaten. When an ant finds a large piece of food, it returns to the nest and collects its fellow workers. On the way back home, it leaves a trail of odors as landmarks, so that it can find its way precisely to the place where it had earlier located the food.Ants also have many food sources. Bees and butterflies are not the only creatures that visit flowers. Ants also come to gather sweet honey released from the honey gland at the base of the leaves and buds of flowers and trees or to collect the sweet sap oozing out from the peeled bark of a tree.

Ants fight in order to monopolize a food resource or to protect their nest. Fight include aggression against other insects attempting to steal their food. Some ants move away if defeated. This behavior suggests that the ants prefer to keep their nests apart in order to live peacefully. Some kinds of ants are quite aggressive in protecting their nest or food resources. The enemy sometimes may be an ant of the same species and sometimes of a different ant species. The fight is continued until the enemy's body is dismembered or it dies. Even ants of the same species sometimes show aggressive behavior if they come from a different nest. When ants of the same species meet outside the nest, they smell each other using their antennae. This allows them to distinguish their fellow ants from those belonging to a different nest. During a fight, a poisonous fluid called formic acid is sprayed from the edge of the gaster, and used to injure and kill the enemy. In addition to the poisonous fluid, the ant uses its mandible for biting.

Most ant species live in the soil. Some, like the carpenter ants, also live in wood (they excavate, but do not actually eat the wood). Some ants live in cavities made inside plants, such as acorns, twigs, and galls. Although there are many winged female ants in one nest, there is only one mated female, the mother, whose wings fall off. This means that ants in the same nest are all brothers and sisters. Since ants are social they display many behaviors that remind us of our families and society. For example, worker ants take care of larvae by feeding and washing them. Ants are able to communicate with each other. They are able to communicate, among other things, directions (to where the food is) and alarm.

When ant colonies reproduce, the new queens and males may be found in the colony. These are "flying ants" and have two pairs of wings. Males generally have small heads, large eyes, large thoraces, and a pair of claspers at the end of the gaster. When the mating flight is approaching, workers busily move in and out of the nest entrance. The head of a male appears, but because it is too early for mating, he is pulled back into the nest with his leg held by the mouth of a worker ant. A young female with a large abdomen cannot fly easily because she is heavy. She climbs up a grass stem in order to make the flight from a height. The young male has finally flown away from the nest entrance. After 1 hour or so, the female that has completed mating returns to the ground and her wings fall off in readiness for the change to becoming a mother (Queen). After mating, new queens never fly again. Without wings, Queens can generally be distinguished from workers by their larger body size, larger thorax and larger abdomen. Once they fly (and mate), males do not live very long. All workers are females.
In the first year, the number of workers is between 10 and 20. In the second year, the number increases to between 30 and 100 and these workers raise eggs and larvae. The mother (Queen) is given food and cared for by the workers. She lives only to lay eggs. The eggs mature in to larvae. Ant larvae are white and grub like. They have no legs and don't move about much on their own. You can generally see a large, dark stomach through their cuticle. Ant pupae look like white adult ants, with their legs and antennae pressed close to their bodies.In some species, larvae spin silk and the pupal stage is inside a cocoon. Newly emerged adult ants are often paler than older ones. It may take them several days to reach their final color.
When it become cold outside in late fall, the ants move deep into the nest looking for a warm place. Millepedes and springtails living in a litter sometimes hibernate during winter in a shallow place in the nest. The exit becomes closed naturally with soil and sands during this period.

All this just goes to show what amazing creatures ants are. When a species performs feats such as earth excavated by one colony of leaf-cutter ants in Brazil weighing in at about 44 tons - a construction job equivalent to the building of the Great Wall of China, its easy to see how incredible an even such a miniscule and easily overlooked organism really is.