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Tag: "ants" at biology news

Ants show us how to make super-highways

Certain army ants in the rainforests of Central and South America co...ning up to 200,000 foraging ants. Remarkably, some ants use their bodies to plug potholes in the trail leading back to the nest, making a flatter surface so...

World's leading scientists announce creation of 'Encyclopedia of Life'

...will connect scientific communities concerned with ants to apples to zebras. As part of its work, the Encyclopedia of Life will collaborate and partner with a wide range of organizations, individuals, and experts to help strengthen the Encyclopedia and its impact on communities throughout the world. ...

City ants take the heat

...an heat islands. These researchers discovered that ants within South America's largest city—São Paulo, Brazil—could tolerate heat better than ants from outside this city. Their findings, to be published in the online journal PLoS ONE, suggest that...

Invasive ants territorial when neighbors are not kin

...San Diego biologists shows that invasive Argentine ants appear to use genetic differences to distinguish f...rom foe, a finding that helps to explain why these ants form enormous colonies in California. In the December issue of the journal Molecular Ecology, the...

Why do some queen bees eat their worker bee's eggs?

Worker bees, wasps, and ants are often considered neuter. But in many species t...ry. His hypothesis was that worker bees, wasps and ants do not reproduce because most workers are half sisters. Instead the workers favor the queen's male p...

How ants find their way

Ever wondered how ants find their way straight to the uncovered food in y... an efficient learning strategy. On the first trip ants store images of the route as they travel and on later trips to the food site will navigate using a c...

New genetic analysis forces re-draw of insect family tree

...dently. "Now that we know that bees, wasps and ants are in fact the closest relatives to the more distantly related (or 'basal') species, it appears more likely that the genetic basis for eusociality may have evolved only once, and was lost in the common ancestor of beetles, moths, and flies." The ...

Fire ant-attacking fly spreading rapidly in Texas

...itic flies introduced to control red imported fire ants have spread over four million acres in central and...rom Brazil and Argentina, to control invasive fire ants without pesticides. The fly larvae develop inside the ants and kill their host. Dr. Ed LeBrun, a r...

Fire ants: Their true story told by the scientist who loves them

... scientists learn can be applied to other types of ants as well. Naturally, there's no end to public inter...ng seems a little unfair, since opportunistic fire ants will devour termites, ticks, weevils, mosquitoes and other major threats to Southern plants, propert...

Wasps queue for top job

...of eusocial animals - including insects like bees, ants and wasps, and vertebrates like meerkats and the naked mole rat ?is that some individuals forgo their own reproduction to help rear the offspring of others. In hover wasps, helpers spend between 0 and 95 per cent of their time foraging to feed the ...

How low can you go? Ants learn to limbo

Have you ever tried to do the limbo? For ants it's a way of life! Scientists at the University of Zurich have discovered that ants are able to learn how to visually judge the height of horizontal barriers so that they can successfu...

Study reveals classic symbiotic relationship between ants, bacteria

...stic relationship. The researchers found that the ants house the bacteria in specialized, highly adapted ...es of bacteria," says Currie. "This indicates the ants have rapidly adapted to maintain the bacteria. It also indicates that the co-evolution between the ...

Some like it hot: Worms at deep-sea vents favor a fiery 45-55°C

...osure to a temperature of 55 degrees Celsius. Such ants will survive brief forays into similarly hot areas to obtain food, but do not choose to remain in superheated environs as Alvinellids do. "We speculate that these worms have evolved to prefer and tolerate these temperatures because it allows them to...

First demonstration of 'teaching' in non-human animals

...the nest to a food source. Signals between the two ants control both the speed and course of the run. It i...son may continue." Tandem running in Temnothorax ants meets all these criteria and thus qualifies as teaching. At the start of a tandem run, the leader f...

Extinctions linked to climate change

... pace, we should expect many other host taxa, from ants to zebras, to be confronted with similar challenges." Very few of the current studies on biodiversity consider how climate affects disease dynamics, said Blaustein. Until the potential impacts of pathogens, parasites and other types of disease tran...

Ancient DNA provides clues to the evolution of social behavior

...ion of social behavior in other animals, including ants and humans. Population crash Named for the ''tuc-tuc-tuc'' sound of its call, the colonial tuco-tuco (Ctenomys sociabilis) lives in remote highland savannah areas of southern Argentina. Unlike the more than 50 other tuco-tuco species that live mo...

A bug's life: Exceptional genomic stability yet rapid protein evolution in a carpenter ant mutualist

...s may synthesize certain nutrients that enable the ants to inhabit unique ecological niches and thrive on nutritionally unbalanced food sources. This mutualistic association is thought to contribute to the astounding ecological success of Camponotus, which, with approximately 1,000 species, represents the...

Ants, not evil spirits, create devil's gardens in the Amazon rainforest, study finds

...t, as colonies can live for 800 years." Devilish ants Most tropical rainforests are densely populated ...call allelopathy. Others argue that devil's garden ants are responsible for controlling vegetation, either by extensive pruning or poisoning. "The idea is t...

Ants win a waxy race

Ever tried to defeat natural forces? Specialist ants are capable of running on slippery waxy plant surf...st Asia have waxy stems to protect themselves from ants and other insects. Only one specific ant is capable of running up and down the stem, in order to acc...

Insects, viruses could hold key for better human teamwork in disasters

...from the collaboration patterns that honeybees and ants use, and the spread patterns viruses typically tak...is by "'learning' basic principles on how bees and ants are able to effectively self-organize based on local information," said Contractor, who directs the ...

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