Origin: Zhang Hao.
Producer: Computer Network Information Center
Social insects such as bees, ants and termites can be said to be out-and-out model workers in the animal kingdom. Worker bees (ants), which account for the vast majority of the group, work hard day and night to provide energy for the social operation of the whole group. Some worker ants of some ant species will develop powerful jaws and become soldier ants. They not only have to do more daily work, but also often have to fight invaders with their lives.
The powerful social productivity of insects completely crushed individual insects, which also led many creatures to have the idea of' group feeding'. For example, many kinds of creatures live in ant nests and even nests, deceiving men and dominating women. This kind of creature, which actively approaches the ant society and benefits from the socialized production of ants, has a unique name, called good ant creature.
I'm afraid I can't finish reading a book about the enmity between kind ant creatures and ants. Today, we will tell some stories about them. I'm sure you will be surprised after reading it.
The relationship between good ants and ants is extremely complicated, which can't be summarized as parasitism, * * * being born, preying and being preyed. There are all kinds of good ants, unicellular parasites, crustaceans, bipeds, rodents, crickets, ichthyosaurs, flies, butterflies and so on. It may intersect with ants at some stage or even all stages of life. At present, there are 17 orders, 130 families, more than 350 genera and more than 1000 species.
Wasmann, the pioneer of excellent ant biology research, classified excellent ant biology as early as 1894. According to their diplomatic relationship with ant colonies, good ant creatures can be divided into friendly, ignoring and hostile types. In addition, there are two complementary forms, parasites and plants. For these types, let's give an example.
Friendly ant creatures, the ant colony is friendly to them, not only will it not attack them actively, but it may also feed these creatures with nutrition. But interestingly, the ant colony doesn't seem to benefit from it at all. Obviously, you can't eat and drink freely in the ant colony without a skill.
The secret of friendly ant creatures is deception. Ants have poor eyesight, but they have a keen sense of touch and smell. They rely on the same sense of smell and touch to identify themselves and their enemies. Friendly ant creatures know this well, and they cheat the ant colony through various disguises.
Military ants are common ant species in Asian rainforests. It is famous for its frequent "moving" and "Long March" behaviors. A creature called Paederus obliquus is good at disguising itself as one of the army ants. They not only cheat to eat and drink, but also don't bother to move their legs when walking. When climbing over obstacles such as tree roots, you can often see such a picture: an army ant holds its tentacles with its powerful jaw to help it climb.
Ignore good ant creatures: Ant colonies tend to ignore their existence in nests and neither attack nor care about them. They lived a sneaky life in their nests, lived in Cao Cao's heart, and lived by stealing ants' nutrition, excrement and even larvae.
Ant colony is a closed society with high security. As an alien, you can be ignored by everyone, and of course you have to be kidnapped. Ant creatures that ignore kindness will consciously make themselves like ants, but compared with friendly ones, their methods are much rougher and they can only try their best not to be exposed, so they can't be treated as guests like friendly ones.
Crickets common in Japan are very small. They often live in ant nests and steal animal remains brought back by ants. Because they can't produce odor molecules carried by ants themselves, their strategy is to rub them shamelessly in order to' stick' themselves to the smell of ants.
Interestingly, once they leave the ant colony for a period of time, their protective smell will disappear, and they are likely to be attacked when they re-enter the ant colony. In order to avoid this situation, crickets will have regular' close contact' with ants in their nests and take the initiative to' hug' the latter, so that the smell they carry will not dissipate.
Crickets in the ant colony
Hostile ant-loving creatures: Once the ant colony finds them, it will make an attack response. Since the ant colony doesn't want to make friends with them, why do they still have a soft spot for ants? The answer is that these creatures are often natural enemies of ants, and they make a living by hunting or robbing ants of their materials.
Hostile good ant creatures often have powerful forces that ants can't resist, so they are too lazy to pretend to be similar and' hard' with ants. In this sense, anteaters should also be regarded as this group.
A small carnivorous bee lives in the broad-leaved forest in central Europe. Unlike bees, they don't have their own social groups. Female bees nest in rotten wood and lay eggs in it to raise larvae. Their diet is very simple and they are a special kind of ants. Female bees usually look for the nest of this unfortunate ant in the forest. Once they find an individual, they paralyze it with poisonous needles and drag it back to their nest.
Paralyzed ants will not die for a while, but they have lost their resistance. In this hive, a large number of ants that are not eaten by larvae are often found.
In addition to the above three good ant organisms, parasites and plant organisms often appear in ant populations. The difference between parasites here and friendly and kind ant creatures is that parasites often attack individual ants. For example, parasites on the surface or body of ants are mainly multicellular parasites, but occasionally there are other insects parasitic in ants.
A parasitic fly in Europe directly chooses the parasitic object as the' virgin queen' of an ant. The latter refers to the sexually mature females with wings in the ant colony, who will leave the ant colony and start another mountain in the future, which is the so-called' queen ant'.
When these new parasitic queens arrived at the ant colony and began to lay eggs, their ovaries had already been eaten up by the larvae of parasitic flies, and the eggs laid were no longer ant eggs, but maggots of parasitic flies. This maggot will soon turn into a pupa and look like an ant larva. The new queens will take good care of the pupae of parasitic flies until they become flies and fly away, and they can't figure out their cruel fate.
You may be familiar with an excellent ant creature closely related to the ant colony. Many insect larvae secrete sweet juice, which is excellent nutrition for ants. So ants will play the role of nanny, take care of these larvae and protect their safety. This is a typical raw nutrition.
The following example is the opposite. Social insects provide food for good ants, and good ants provide protection for social insects.
There is a small beetle living in Southeast Asia, which is only 5 mm long. They usually live in the nests of termites (not ants, but also social insects) and feed on the humus in the nests. However, the "protection fee" is not paid in vain. Beetles will become the "meat shield" of termites in times of crisis, protecting the safety of the whole nest.
This beetle has a "stunt", its body can be spherical, and its armor is quite strong. A spherical beetle is as big as the entrance to a termite nest. They rushed to the entrance, spherical, and could perfectly block the invading enemy. Therefore, beetles become the beaters of termites.
Hard-working workers and social insects are often remembered by some malicious "lazy people" or even "robbers". Of course, human beings cannot attach their own subjective guesses to everything that happens in nature. On this planet, although workers are the most beautiful, only evolution is the ultimate goal.
Related question and answer: Ants beat up those novels by hand. Founded in June, 20 10, Ant Handwriting Group is a popular novel handcrafting group organized by Baidu Post Bar in Qing Dynasty. Ants have played many popular novels, such as Life in Qing Dynasty, Happy Birthday and Back Door Corner. Related question and answer: What is the communication between ants? Why can ants know food far away? Ants are one of our most common insects. They are almost everywhere. Many friends must have observed ants when they were young, but there are many curious places, such as how ants find food. How do they communicate? How do they remember the way home? Wait a minute. Today, we will briefly talk about these issues.
How do ants find food?
Ants are social animals. In an ant nest, different ants have different division of labor. Except the queen ant and the male ant responsible for reproduction, most other ants are divided into two parts: soldier ants who are "thugs" and worker ants who are "servants". But because soldier ants and worker ants are infertile females, the boundary between them is not particularly obvious. Simply put, worker ants and soldier ants can switch freely as needed. In general, the difference between soldier ants and worker ants can only be based on the size of the jaw. The big one is a soldier ant and the small one is a worker ant.
The nest is built on the basis of the queen ant. When the nest is built, all the activities of ants are centered on the nest. At first, all the worker ants searched aimlessly for food. They will be divided into several groups to conduct a carpet search in all directions of the nest. In the process of searching, worker ants will constantly use their antennae to perceive, and the ends of the antennae of ants are swollen, which is very flexible and has strong odor discrimination ability. In the process of searching, once ants perceive the taste of food, they will stay in place for a short time, and then their tentacles will continue to move in all directions to lock the direction of food. After locking the direction of food, as the ants move, the smell becomes stronger and stronger so that they can find food.
Path planning of ants
Ants are very small. Although they can drag food more than 65,438+0,000 times their own weight, they can also lift objects more than 50 times their own weight, but the weight of ants is only between 0.05 mg and 20 mg, which means that even a "Hercules" can only drag objects from 50 mg to 20 g. For most objects, the strength is obviously too small, which means that under normal circumstances,
After an ant nest has developed for a period of time, the route of worker ants is basically fixed, because they have defined their own route, and the clear method is very simple, that is, pheromones are constantly released on the way.
Ant pheromones are mainly divided into two types: alarm pheromones and tracking pheromones. It is difficult for us to distinguish these two pheromones, but for ants, they can be distinguished accurately. If there are natural enemies of ants in one direction, the ants who are exploring the road for the first time will continue to release alarm pheromones after sensing the natural enemies, so that their companions will not go this way again. Similarly, if a route is full of pheromones, then companions can find food accurately through pheromones.
In this process, every time ants carry food, they will leave traces of pheromones on the route. Because pheromones will recover and dissipate after a long time, ants must constantly strengthen the pheromone concentration along this route.
Therefore, after ants look for food, it is usually difficult to get it at once, so they will leave "information" on the route. One is to find the way home, and the other is to tell other companions that they left a way to the food when they brought it home. Of course, if the ants are not far from the nest, they will also release a hormone that aggregates information. At this time, the ants in the nest will quickly gather to help. According to scientific research, although ants are small in size, their tentacles can sense these pheromones hundreds of meters away.
Of course, different ant colonies release different pheromones. Usually, pheromones of different ant colonies are a dangerous signal to other ant colonies, reminding them that there are competitors in this path. For some ants with weak fighting capacity, they will take the initiative to avoid them. However, for those animals with strong fighting capacity, such as red imported fire ants and bullet ants, these pheromones can help them find their prey.
It is precisely because ants rely too much on pheromones that sometimes they can be fatal, especially for those ants who have no vision, such as the "death vortex" of military ants. Army ants have no visual ability at all, because their eyes are highly degraded, so when they go out in droves for food, they usually follow an elderly army ant, and the route of this leading army ant depends on the companions who were looking for food before. Once the army ants looking for food get lost somewhere and leave the wrong pheromone, it may cause the leading ants to spin around in the same place, and finally all the army ants will spin around with the leading ants, forming a "death vortex"
abstract
Ants can't speak or make sounds, so their communication can only rely on tentacles, and tentacles can perceive pheromones. Ants release different pheromones to communicate in different situations. Moreover, once ants go out to look for food, they will leave pheromones on the path. If there is no food in this direction, the pheromones on the path will be uniform. If there is food, the pheromone on the path will become stronger. This is one of their ways to inform other companions. If the companions still don't come, they either send a team member back to inform them, or bring some food back to the ant nest together and gather more ants to go out again.