Will the ants be rotten? For human beings, the meaning of rotting is similar to eating and waiting for death, that is, completely letting oneself go, this phenomenon is very easy to appear when people encounter a low period, but people can adjust their mentality and behavior to get rid of this dilemma.
So,As highly social insects, will ants be "rotten"? The answer is yes, they will not only rot, but they will also rot as a group, but they will also changeWhat's going on here? Let's find out.
Ants are an ancient class of insects, and they were about 1400 million years ago, the early Cretaceous period appeared on the earth, which means that ants used to look up to see dinosaurs, but their vision is too poor and their eyes are too small, so even if they see dinosaurs, they are not aware of it.
The flourishing of the ant family began with the increasing number of flowering plants, because the early ants preferred to eat honeydew secreted by flowering plants over other foods.
Once ants find food or are attacked, they will secrete a large number of pheromones, which travel very far away, and after others do not perceive it, they will immediately go to the destination, carry food or participate in battles.
Ants are highly social insects, they have a clear division of labor, in which the builder of the ant colony is the queen, when an ant nest matures, it needs to expand, at this time the female ant and the male ant with reproductive ability will grow wings for marriage flight, and the female ant who successfully mates needs to find a place to lay eggs, and it is the queen, and the nest is the base camp of the nest.
When the queen ant begins to lay eggs, it will be inconvenient, and the ant nest is a complex, huge project, it is obviously unable to complete itself, at this time it needs helpers, so the first batch of hatched eggs are female ants that do not have the ability to reproduce, that is, worker ants, worker ants are the most tired in the colony, they not only have to go out to search for food, but also take care of eggs and larvae.
But it's not enough to just have a job, because the ants are widely distributed, there are many numbers, and they have a certain sense of territory between each other, and they will be bullied once they are weak, so the female ants born for the fight appeared, they also do not have the ability to have children, and their main responsibility is to defend and fight, and they are much stronger than the large jaws of the worker ants, so they can assist in biting some hard food.
Soldier. With these basic guarantees, male ants hatched from unfertilized eggs appeared, male ants do not do anything, only responsible for mating with the queen, however, male ants also have disadvantages, that is, they often die soon after mating, so that the real "peony flower dies".
Of course, ants not only have this large social division of labor, in terms of details, their division of labor is also very clear, in the worker ants of different ages do different jobs, for example, the newly hatched worker ants are responsible for working in the nest, taking care of the larvae, eggs, cleaning, and the older worker ants are mainly responsible for going out to find food.
It can be seen that although ants are small, they have a clear division of labor and a high degree of sociality, and to some extent, their sociality is the closest to humans.
Ants, bees these animals often give people a very industrious feeling, a bit of "spring silkworms to the end of the silkworm" meaning, but in fact, bees are a diurnal animal, at night they also have to rest, and the same is true for ants, although they will still come out to forage at night, but there are always some ants can get rest, especially the newly hatched worker ants, their work in the nest is not so tedious, rest is normal.
And even if the worker ants go out, they do not stop all the time, they usually find food, and then return to the nest to rest for a while, and other worker ants go out to forage, similar to shifts.
The soldier ants are more idle, they are mainly responsible for defense, when there is no intruder, they are usually in a state of "rotten", and when it comes to male ants, they are closer to "eating and waiting to die", because male ants often only mate with the queen once, and then they have nothing to do, they have been staying in the nest, eating and waiting for death.
However, these are the attributes given to them by their division of labor or duties, so are there any real ants who "eat and wait to die"? The answer is yes.
Back in 2013, Tobias Pamminger, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sussex in the UK, published a new study** in which he discovered a colony of "rotten" ants that hide among healthy worker ants through long-term observation and study of different ant colonies.
Tobias found that in almost all normal ant colonies, there will always be a group of worker ants, they do nothing, and they rarely even go out, they do not clean in the nest, take care of the larvae, but he did not understand why these worker ants "eat and wait to die".
It wasn't until 2015 that Daniel Charbonneau and Anna Dornhaus of the University of Arizona in the United States decided to verify and try to find out the reason after seeing Tobias's **, they moved 5 complete wild ant colonies to the laboratory, and used a 24-hour camera to record the ants in the nest.
To be more precise, the duo and their research team spent a considerable amount of time tagging the worker ants in the nest so that they could know what they were doing. During the two weeks of observation, they first confirmed Tobias's claim, because there are indeed some worker ants in the colony who do nothing every day, and look like they are eating and waiting to die.
At the same time, they found that among the worker ants, about 3 of the worker ants are working almost all the time, they go out to forage for food, and when they come back, they also participate in cleaning and caring for the eggs and larvae, about 72 of the worker ants only work half a day, and 25 of the worker ants never work.
So many "mixed and waiting to die" worker ants are obviously a "burden" to the nest, but strangely despite this pattern, the colony is still well-organized, well-fed, and even infighting rarely occurs.
On the surface, these rotten worker ants are useless, and they also consume the fruits of the labor of other worker ants, but in fact this is not the case, the two scientists found through observation, the ants that 3 will hardly stop working are the first to be born worker ants, and the food they are looking for is actually almost enough to feed the entire ant colony (more than 60 of the food **), and the 72 born later, only need to work less than half a day to fill the previous vacancy.
As for the 25 rotten worker ants, there is really nothing to do, they have food security, and the newly hatched worker ants are responsible for cleaning and caring for the larvae, so they really have nothing to do.
At the same time, these rotten worker ants also have an important role - "fill in the blanks", foraging is the largest proportion of ant deaths, they are either eaten by natural enemies, or trampled to death by large animals, so the loss rate of migrant ants is very high, and these "mixed eating and waiting to die" worker ants are in the field after the number of worker ants decreased, even as a substitute to fill in the blank.
There is such a group of worker ants, no matter what the worker ant's position has a problem, they can replace it at any time, so they are not completely mixed and waiting to die.
The ant colony is a huge family, in this family, the largest number is the worker ants, and the worker ants are responsible for foraging, in the process of foraging, these worker ants usually eat a part of the food, and then the rest is transported back to the nest, so that in fact, only less food is enough to support the normal life of the ant colony, so it is normal for ants to "eat and die", but the state of these ants will not last long, because they need to check and fill in the gaps. **10,000 Fans Incentive Plan