Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (88 page)

Herb poll: 68% of liberals like cilantro. Only 59% of conservatives do.

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.

Wine contains more than 250 chemical compounds—it’s more complex than blood.

• 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.

Not just peanuts: George Washington Carver invented 75 uses for pecans.

• 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.)

In 2009 author James Patterson signed a deal to write 17 books by 2012…for $100 million.

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 sometimes 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.

Boys are 10 times more likely to get acne than girls.

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.

German folk remedy: To quiet a teething baby, rub its gums with sheep brains.

• 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.