Ants

I always wondered about those small creatures that live beneath the surface of earth, always on the astir - ANTS.

During my childhood period we learnt a poem that involved an ant and a cricket [Aesop's The Ant and the Grasshopper fable], and we always praised the ant for her diligence, industriousness and cooperative effort and blamed the cricket for his known laziness.



Today I received a link with respect to the ant colonies, and their subterranean megalopolis. I was so amazed, once again of these little creatures and their effort to build strong underground structures, small natural cavities to highly organised colonies which may occupy large territories and consist of millions of individuals. The family Formicidae belongs to the order Hymenoptera, which also includes sawflies, bees and wasps.
Here's the link.
They have colonised almost every landmass on Earth. Ants are found on all continents except Antarctica and only a few large islands such as Greenland, Iceland, parts of Polynesia and the Hawaiian Islands lack native ant species.
Ants communicate with each other using pheromones. These chemical signals are more developed in ants than in other hymenopteran groups. Like other insects, ants perceive smells with their long, thin and mobile antennae. The paired antennae provide information about the direction and intensity of scents. Since most ants live on the ground, they use the soil surface to leave pheromone trails that can be followed by other ants. In species that forage in groups, a forager that finds food marks a trail on the way back to the colony; this trail is followed by other ants, these ants then reinforce the trail when they head back with food to the colony. When the food source is exhausted, no new trails are marked by returning ants and the scent slowly dissipates. This behaviour helps ants deal with changes in their environment.
Ants attack and defend themselves by biting and, in many species, by stinging, often injecting or spraying chemicals like formic acid [The word ant is derived from ante of Middle English which is derived from æmette of Old English and is related to the Old High German āmeiza, hence the modern German Ameise. All of these words come from West Germanic *amaitjo, and the original meaning of the word was "the biter" (from Proto-Germanic *ai-, "off, away" + *mait- "cut")].
What amazed me the most was the fact that many animals can learn behaviours by imitation, but ants may be the only group apart from mammals where interactive teaching has been observed.

I also wandered the wikipedia in search of other informations about them [technical infos] and got this. Hope you are also interested in my research and you'll have the curiosity and the patience to read this as I was.

Hope I didn't bored you to death with my curiosities and that you didn't fallen asleep while doing this, or worst scenario, you already closed the window containing my blog post ...

'Till next time, XO XO, yours one and only :)