About ants
Many of us, in childhood, watched with pleasure the garden and forest ants at the dacha, marveling at the coherence of their work, and not even noticing how they periodically bit us, defending their possessions. Those who managed to visit tropical forests, probably met more formidable representatives of the ant world, one bite of which can cost a life. In the end, most of us, city dwellers, one way or another encountered domestic ants, which have been constant companions of man for many millennia.
There are more than 14,000 species of ants in the world, ranging in size from 1 millimeter to 5 centimeters. Each species has its own characteristics in nutrition, behavior, and lifestyle in general. But they are all similar in one thing - ants live in numerous colonies, from several dozen to tens of millions of individuals in each.
How an ant colony is formed
How does an ant colony form? During the flight, when winged females and males capable of mating appear in the ant colony, the latter fly out of their native anthill and mate, usually in the air. During mating, the female receives a supply of sperm from the male for her entire subsequent life, and her life, it must be said, can last up to 25 years or more. The male dies soon after this, since he has already fulfilled his function, and the female looks for a suitable place to found a new nest - a future colony. And, having found this place, she bites off or breaks off her own wings, since she will never need them again.
Next, the queen lays the first few eggs, from which the larvae emerge. The queen feeds these larvae throughout the entire period of their growth and development, until the moment when the first worker ants emerge from them. The queen herself does not feed at all during this time.
Where does she get the nutrients to maintain her life, lay her first eggs, and feed the larvae? Firstly, her abdomen contains a fairly significant supply of protein, which is necessary for the formation of eggs and the first stage of feeding the larvae. The queen takes this supply out of her nest, where she was born. But when this battery of vital energy is depleted, the queen turns on "reserve capacities".
The queen ant's thorax contains the muscles that move her wings. Now that her wings are gone, all the muscle protein can be converted into a nutrient mixture to feed the larvae, which is what she does.
As soon as the first workers appear, they immediately go in search of food, and now they begin to feed the queen and take care of her, and she completely switches to laying eggs, which is what she will now do for the rest of her life.
It should be noted that different species of ants have their own characteristics of colony formation; in some species, this process even differs radically from that described above, but these are rather exceptions.
How an anthill works
An anthill is a complex structure, much like the structure of human society. Again, each species of ants has its own characteristics, but we will describe it in an average way, using the most common species of ants as an example.
First of all, it should be said that an anthill is a multitude of separate chambers of different sizes, locations and purposes, connected to each other by a branched network of passages. The most important, the most distant from the entrances and hidden in the depths of the anthill, and also the best guarded chamber are the chambers of the queen - the ant queen.
This chamber contains the queen herself and her attendants, worker ants and nurse ants. They bring her food, look after her, and clean her.
The eggs that the queen constantly lays are immediately taken to another chamber - the brood chamber. Here, the eggs hatch into larvae, which are also fed by nurse ants. The brood and larval chambers are the most demanding in terms of temperature and humidity, since the slightest deviation of these conditions from the norm can negatively affect the development of the young, or even lead to their death. In order to protect their offspring from unexpected changes in temperature and humidity, ants have many brood chambers located in different parts of the anthill. And in the event of an unacceptable change in conditions in one chamber, the nurse ants immediately transfer all the brood to other chambers, where the conditions are more suitable.
The next type of chambers in the anthill are food warehouses. In them, ants store food supplies, like harvester ants, which build entire underground barns to store harvested grain. And leaf-cutter ants and South American ants have real agricultural production in these chambers. A special fungal culture is grown here, which this type of ant feeds on. And they collect leaves not for their own food, but for the food of this very fungus.
And another main type of chambers in anthills are, so to speak, "sleeping areas". These are the chambers in which adult worker ants live. Here, in normal times, the ants rest and communicate cheerfully.
However, if necessary, these chambers can change their purpose. For example, they can also be used as a food storage or a brood chamber.
It is these chambers that make up the main part of any anthill, since the number of workers in some colonies can reach several million ants.
Ants living in northern latitudes and temperate climate zones also have two additional types of chambers: solarium chambers and wintering chambers. Solarium chambers are located in the very top part of the anthill, the part that is located at the very surface and is easily warmed by the sun's rays. Ants come here to "warm up their bones" when the temperature is too low. Ants especially often resort to solariums in early spring, when they have already emerged from hibernation, but the ground has not yet had time to warm up.
The wintering chambers, on the contrary, are located quite deep, in the depths of the anthill, in the part that does not freeze even in the most severe winter frosts. There, the ants spend their entire winter in a state of semi-sleep, when all processes in the insects' bodies slow down many times, due to which they have enough reserves of nutrients for several months.
In addition to the chambers and the passages connecting them, there are also ventilation and drainage channels in the anthill. These are also a kind of passages, often having separate entrances and not used for movement. Their purpose is to bring fresh air into the deep sections of the anthill and to drain excess water, especially during rains.
In general, as was said at the beginning, an anthill is a very complex system of passages and chambers, which we will never be able to see in its entirety in nature. But in order to see this amazing structure in 3D format, the researchers conducted an interesting experiment. An entire bucket of molten tin was poured into an abandoned nest of fire ants, which filled the entire internal space of the anthill, and then the resulting form was dug out and washed from the remains of the earth.
We invite you to watch the video and admire the unique forms created underground by these amazingly hardworking creatures - ants.
How Ants Exchange Food and Information
In any colony there is a part of the ants that never leave the anthill, including the queen herself. In some species of ants, the soldier caste has such large and powerful mandibles, adapted exclusively for military action, that they themselves cannot eat food. But how do they feed themselves then?
On the other hand, workers, scouts and foragers, who spend most of their time working outside the nest, are always aware of what is happening in the nest. When scouts discover, say, a food source, soon the entire nest knows about it, and squads of workers and soldiers are immediately mobilized and set out on a raid. What is the secret?
A distinctive feature of social insects is trophollaxis. Trofollaxis is the ability to transfer food from one's own body to other individuals by regurgitation.
Thus, ants, having eaten their fill, can feed other members of the colony with their secretions. In particular, this is how the queen and larvae are fed. Some species, for example, honey ants, even have a special caste of storage ants, whose abdomens can stretch to unrealistically large sizes, so that they cannot even move normally. These "barrels of food" are located inside the anthill, storing food supplies for the entire colony, in case of a shortage of food.
Every ant in the colony, if necessary, can come up and get a drop of nutritious syrup from such a keeper.
In addition to the function of transferring food, trophollaxis also serves as a means of communication. By transferring food to each other in this way, ants also transmit information. It has been noted that ants often prefer trophollaxis when they are near a food source and have the opportunity to feed themselves, which once again confirms its communicative function.
And yet, the main way of transmitting information in ants is the language of chemical signals and touch, which we will talk about in a special section of our website "The Language of Ants"
