One characteristic that is unique to ants: metapleural glands. These two tiny glands, one on either side of the thorax, produce and secrete an antibiotic concoction that protects ants and their nests from fungus, bacteria, and other infestations—a huge plus in the warm, moist world of ant nests. No other animal is known to have metapleural glands, which, experts say, may play a large part in their overwhelming success.
ANT CASTES
Myrmecologists divide ant society into three major castes: queens, males, and workers.
Queens: The fertile egg-producing members of ant society, they are born with two sets of lacy wings, mate once, lose their wings, and spend the rest of their lives inside their nests, doing little else but laying eggs. An ant colony can have one queen or several; some have hundreds.
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Males: In nearly all ant species, the males are fertile (meaning they can fertilize eggs) and, like queens, they have two sets of wings. They have only one job—to mate with queens, after which they die. There are no other males in a typical ant colony.
Workers: Making up the largest part of a colony’s population by far, worker ants are wingless, sterile females. The workers of a single colony can be many different sizes, creating sub-castes that have different jobs, including nurses, scouts, foragers, and soldiers.
Which caste are you? One of the most interesting things about ant castes is how they’re produced. In most species, queens create the castes by producing different kinds of eggs. They can make unfertilized eggs by laying them without bringing them into contact with the sperm they have stored in their bodies; these always become males. A queen can also lay fertilized eggs by using that stored sperm; these all become females. Most of the females will be the sterile workers, but some will become fertile and, potentially, new queens. The exact details of how this happens are still unknown, but what is known is that young, larval ants that are fed a “normal” diet become sterile workers, and those fed more nutritious food become potential queens.
COLONY FOUNDING
You’ve no doubt heard of the ant’s famous cooperation and social organization skills. To help illustrate how this works, here’s a look at the life cycle of a typical ant colony. There are many different types of colonies, and many different ways that ants behave in those colonies, but this is a good, basic look at the most common way a new colony is formed. It’s called swarming.
• Usually in spring, a mature ant colony starts producing fertile males and females. Because they have wings, they’re commonly referred to as “flying ants.”
• As soon as they’re able, the males fly away and gather with males from other colonies in “swarms” 70 to 1,000 feet in the air. Females from several colonies soon follow. During these “nuptial flights,” the females will mate with 1 to 10 males, usually from other colonies, storing the sperm they acquire in special sacs. That sperm will last each female the rest of her egg-laying life. The males, having done their sole job, soon die.
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• Each mated female flies a few miles, lands, uses her legs to break off her wings, uses her mandibles (jaws) to dig a cavity in the ground a few inches deep, and then closes herself inside it. Her bulky wing muscles, now unnecessary, begin to disintegrate inside her body. The nest she has dug will serve as the basis for a new colony.
• She lays her first tiny, shiny, white eggs. After several weeks they hatch into pale, grublike, legless larvae. They are voracious, and the new queen feeds them with salivary secretions derived primarily from her disintegrated wing muscles.
• After a few more weeks the larvae pupate: They enclose themselves in a cocoonlike covering and go through metamorphosis, changing from larvae to the body shape we know as ants. A few weeks later they hatch, all of them sterile female worker ants.
• Immediately upon hatching, the workers open the nest and begin foraging for food, caring for new eggs, digging new tunnels and chambers, and bringing food to the new queen, who now presides over the beginnings of a brand-new colony.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
As an ant colony grows in size, it naturally develops more complex needs—better food gathering and defense, for example. To meet those needs, the colony begins producing different types of workers. This is accomplished through larval diet (just as it was with the fertile females).
• Some larvae are fed a small amount of food and emerge from the pupal stage as very small ants. These often become nurses, whose primary job is to stay in the nest and care for the young.
• Others are fed a bit more and become larger ants. These might become scouts, who leave the nest to find food and return to notify foragers, even larger (and better-fed) ants who carry the food back to the nest.
• Some larvae are fed large amounts of very nutritious foods—perhaps protein-rich insect parts (liquefied, as ants must liquefy all their food). These larvae emerge as massive ants with huge heads and stout, powerful mandibles. These are the soldiers, and their primary job is to crush and kill whatever threatens, or appears to threaten, the colony. In some species soldiers can be more than 200 times the size of their smaller sisters.
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• The colony continues to grow, sometimes for years, and can eventually include many nests. When it is firmly established and if food is plentiful, one spring the queen will begin to produce fertile males and females. Upon maturing, they fly off and mate, the females create new colonies…and the process starts all over again.
• Another way colonies are commonly founded is budding. This occurs in species that have more than one queen, and entails one or more queen simply taking hundreds (or thousands) of workers and eggs from an established colony and moving out to form another.
• Recently mated females of some species do not form their own colonies, but return to the nest and become egg-laying queens alongside their mother queen. Others travel to established colonies and kill the queen (or queens) and take over the colony. Still others lay their eggs in colonies of competing ant species and, using pheromones, trick the ants there into caring for their young. Those young are all fertile, and upon reaching adulthood they fly off and mate.
HOME MAKERS
Ants are one of a very few animal groups that, like us humans, significantly modify their surroundings to suit their needs. Many ants do it in amazing ways. Here are some examples.
Wood ants are common in forests in southern England. Using pine needles and other debris, they build mounds that can reach 3 feet in height and more than 10 feet in diameter, and can extend many feet underground. Like the nests of most ant species, the chambers inside are climate-controlled: Vents around the nest can be opened or closed to attain the perfect temperature for the development of ant eggs.
Weaver ants are arboreal ants (they live in trees) found in Africa, India, Australia, and the Solomon Islands. To build a nest, rows of workers use their legs and mandibles to form chains between two leaves, which they then pull together. Other workers bring developing larvae to the site—and squeeze them with their mandibles. This causes the larvae to secrete a sticky substance, similar to spider silk, that the workers use to “sew” the leaves together. They do this again and again, eventually forming large, ball-shaped nests. One colony can have hundreds of nests in several adjacent trees. (The young survive the mandible squeezing and are taken to safety in the new nests.)
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Some driver and army ants form “bivouac” nests, made out of…ants. Hundreds of thousands of them converge around a queen and her brood, linking legs and forming a living nest more than three feet across. There are tunnels throughout the mass, and chambers inside are kept at just the right temperature by adjusting the space between the ant bodies. These are migratory ants, and they sometim
es construct and deconstruct their ant-nests every day as the colony moves across the terrain.
TRIUMPH-ANTS
We’ve already mentioned several incredible ant species, but here are some more that we just couldn’t leave out.
Leafcutter ants. There are about 40 species of true leafcutter ants, all of them native to the Americas. They’re named for their practice of going on foraging missions for leaves, but that’s not what’s so amazing about them. Once back at the nest, the ants masticate (chew) the leaves into mulch. The mulch is then added to “gardens” that are used to grow fungus—the only food leafcutter ants give to their larvae. In some species, the fungus and the ants are totally dependent on each other for their survival. Leafcutters are the only animal on Earth besides humans known to cultivate their own food in this way.
Leptothorax minutissimus. These ants have been found in only four spots—all in the eastern United States—and were only discovered in 1942, in Washington, D.C. They have evolved to the point where there are no workers—only queens. They survive by invading colonies of other ant species and setting up shop. Why they aren’t killed by the other species is still unknown. And they’re tiny, just a few millimeters in length: An entire colony, along with their hosts, can live in one hollowed-out acorn.
Mycocepurus smithii. Found primarily in South and Central America, this is another species of leafcutter. Queens reproduce asexually through a process called parthenogenesis, so all the ants in a single colony are clones of the queens.
Driver ants. In this species found in central and east Africa, the males are more than an inch long. Rather than mate in the air, these males are drawn to the scent of long columns of roving workers from other driver ant colonies. Once discovered by those super-aggressive workers, the male is immediately swarmed, his wings are cut off, and he is carried back to the nest. There he serves as a sperm donor for new, virgin queens.
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Honey pot ants. These ants are found in the American Southwest, Mexico, South Africa, New Guinea, and Australia, and feed on flower nectar, some of which they store in sacs in their bodies. Back in the nest they feed it to their larvae—and they also force-feed it to a special caste of workers. These special workers become so engorged with the stuff that their abdomens swell to the size of grapes. From then on, they’re kept deep in the nest as prisoners—and when food is scarce, other ants in the nest come and feed from their swollen “honey pots.”
WE ANT DONE YET
Here are some more random facts about these amazing creatures.
• About 100 ant species have no queens. All the workers in these species are wingless, fertile females, and one usually takes on the dominant egg-laying role. To mate, she leaves the nest, performs a mating dance of sorts, releases pheromones, and attracts a male. She then copulates with him and, in some species, carries him into the nest and bites off his genitalia. The genitalia will continue supplying her with sperm for an hour or more. The male dies.
• The name “ant” traces its roots to the ancient Germanic word amaitjo—which means “the biter.”
• Ants were known to the Romans as formicae. Formic acid, the substance that some species produce as their “sting” chemical, gets its name from this. It’s also why ants are classified in the taxonomic family Formicidae.
• The sting of the inch-long South American bullet ant is considered the most painful of all ant, bee, and wasp stings. It is said to feel like a gunshot wound (which is why they’re called bullet ants). As part of an initiation rite, the Brazilian Satere-Mawe people make mittenlike pouches from leaves and fill them with hundreds of bullet ants. Boys undergoing the initiation have the mittens tied to their hands. Then they must keep the mittens on for about 10 minutes—during which they can be stung hundreds of times—and are not allowed to cry out. Their arms are often paralyzed for days afterward.
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• During floods, fire ant colonies will gather together and form large balls with their bodies, with the queen and her brood at the center. They become living ant rafts that can float this way for miles until they make it back to land, where they set up a new nest.
• Queens of some ant species can live for as long as 30 years and can produce hundreds of millions of eggs over a lifetime.
• Some ant species build supercolonies comprising millions of separate nests, millions of queens, and billions of workers. These supercolonies can cover a few acres—or many thousand square miles.
• Aphids are tiny bugs that feed on sugar-rich plant fluids and poop a substance called honeydew, which is also sugar-rich. Several ant species survive on honeydew and actually “farm” aphids to get it: They protect the aphids from predators and take aphid eggs into their nests during the winter. Some ants have even learned to induce aphids to excrete honeydew by stroking them with their antennae, essentially “milking” them. Some aphid species have even lost the ability to poop…if they’re not stroked by ants.
• In 2009 it was reported that Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), native to South America but accidentally spread around the world, now inhabit several massive supercolonies in the United States, Europe, and Japan, and are now part of an interrelated megacolony of ants…that is literally taking over the ant world.
EXPAND YOUR VOCABULARY
• A gynotikolobomassophile is someone who likes to nibble on women’s earlobes.
• The fuzzy frame of mind between sleep and consciousness is technically referred to as a hypnopompic state.
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FROM AUDI 5000 TO
ZUNNDAPP JANUS
An A-to-Z of the weirdest, wildest, and most wonderful motor vehicles ever made.
A is for Audi 5000, the car that gave us the phrase “sudden unintended acceleration” in the 1980s. The phrase refers to defects that make a car suddenly speed up without pressing the accelerator. It was believed to have caused hundreds of crashes and even some deaths. Audi was forced to recall millions of the 5000 models due to the problem…but it was never really proven that the cars had any defects—and a class-action suit by owners of the cars is still in court. The phrase resurfaced in 2009 when several Toyota models were recalled for the same reason.
B is for Bugatti Veyron, a French high-performance “supercar” first produced in 2004. It has 16 cylinders, can go from 0–180 mph in 14 seconds, and has an astounding 1,001 horsepower. The Veyron EB model has a top speed of just over 265 mph—making it the fastest production car in the world. Cost: about $1.7 million.
C is for Chevrolet 6700-series bus—the model used in the 1970s TV classic, The Partridge Family. Painted in brightly-colored blocks (inspired by the work of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian), the bus appeared in the pilot in 1970 and remained on the show until it was canceled in 1974. It was abandoned after that, and sat behind Lucy’s Tacos on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Los Angeles until 1987, when it was taken to a junk yard.
D is for Divco, founded in 1926. Divco—an acronym for Detroit Industrial Vehicles Company—made delivery vehicles, and if you’re old enough, you may remember one of them: They made the iconic milk delivery trucks that were used all over the country until the 1970s. Divco made the milk trucks for 60 years (until 1986) giving them the distinction of being the company that made the same model vehicle longer than any other in the world…after the Volkswagen Beetle.
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E is for Edsel, the name that still means “FAILURE!” Ford made about 115,000 of them from 1959 until 1962—and lost an astounding $350 million along the way. The unfortunate car was named after Henry Ford’s only son, Edsel Bryant Ford.
F is for Fisker, a California-based hybrid luxury sportscar manufacturer named after owner Henrik Fisker. They debuted their first prototype, the Karma, in 2008. Featu
res: solar panels on the roof to run minor electrical systems; leather interiors made from the hides of free-range cattle that were never branded; wood trim from “non-living” trees (such as wood taken from trees long submerged in lakes); an “animal-free” model that uses bamboo-based cloth instead of leather; and a center console inlaid with fossilized leaves. Cost: from about $80,000 to $106,000.
G is for Gumpert, a German street-legal supercar made by Roland Gumpert. Our favorite thing about the Gumpert: the name. (We really hope they have a “Forrest” Gumpert model.) The car first appeared in 2005, and became known around the world in 2008 when the popular British television show Top Gear raced one on their test track—and it ran the best time in the show’s history.
H is for Horsey Horseless Carriage, invented by Battle Creek, Michigan, inventor Uriah Smith in 1899. Smith thought he had come up with the design for the first car that wouldn’t scare horses. It looked like a small horse-drawn carriage, except that it had a small engine…and a wooden facsimile of a horse’s head jutting out from its front. “The live horse would be thinking of another horse,” Smith wrote, “and before he could discover his error and see that he had been fooled, the strange carriage would be passed!” The Horsey Horseless is known only from advertisements; no examples survive.
I is for Isuzu, named after the Isuzu River, located in Mie Prefecture on the east coast of Honshu Island, Japan. The name means “50 bells” and was first used in 1934 for a truck made by the Automobile Industries Co., Ltd., in Tokyo. In 1949 the company changed its name to Isuzu.
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