emily0 brought this article to my attention this morning:
Trap-building ants torture preyonce, when i was a child, i was sitting on the grass while my mom was hanging laundry out to dry. i was talking and laughing, and a split second later, i was screaming. my legs were on fire from what felt like hundreds of excruciating stings. my mom realized that my legs were covered with dozens of fat black ants and whisked me to the bathtub. i inadvertently sat on top of an anthill. looking over my mom's shoulder, my stomach turned when i saw a rapidly expanding, seething mass of ants on the spot where i was sitting just moments before.A fierce species of Amazonian ant has been seen building elaborate traps on which hapless prey are stretched like medieval torture victims, before being slowly hacked to pieces.
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for a while afterwards, i delighted in exacting a childish form of revenge by pouring all manner of liquids down the anthills in our yard and watching with satisfaction as ants swarmed out in a panic, some writhing in their final death throes. many years later, as a seventh-grader, i read Leiningen versus the Ants. my skin crawled at the memory of those stinging, swarming ants, and i was thankful they never sought revenge on me.
ants are fascinating creatures -- leafcutter ants are farmers - they cultivate a fungus for their own consumption. in fact, they depend on that species of fungus to survive, and it is the only fungus they eat. there is an Argentinean species that is capable of building and maintaining super-colonies that stretch for hundreds of kilometers. the cooperative nature of eusocial insects is in my opinion one of the most astounding products of evolution. ants can form complex societies capable of amazing feats of engineering, all made possible through the division of labor.
3 comments:
I hate ants. I despise them with a passion.
And you know, whenever you see one, there are millions around.
I agree. ants are fascinating..
i, too, used to torture the ants just so i could watch one come out to take the dead ant away for a proper burial.
i wonder if ants are the humans of the insect world.. any idea as to what the "smartest" bug is?
i like reading about ants and observing them *outdoors*. i certainly can't stand to have them in the house.
as for the 'smartest' bug -- well, that's a pretty hard question to answer. what does 'smart' mean? eusocial bees are also capable of highly organized communities. they even exhibit advanced forms of communication.
many years ago, i took a class in human evolutionary biology. one of the over-arching themes in the class was determining exactly what makes human beings unique. that seems like an easy question to answer at first --- the standard response was 'intelligence.' humans are capable of self-organized, ordered, complex social systems, and they have language.
but ants and bees build self-organized, complex, ordered societies and exhibit communicative abilities akin to, but not nearly as complex or advanced as human language. yet, they lack consciousness as we know it.
so, what does being 'smart' mean?
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