Ants are good models for studying recognition mechanisms, because they are typically very efficient in discriminating 'friends' (nest-mates) from 'foes' (non-nest-mates).
A recent study shows that aggressive colonies of army ants can be cooperative when they have to. If the queen of one colony dies, the colony will attempt to assimilate itself into another.
Ants don't have complex emotions such as love, anger, or empathy, but they do approach things they find pleasant and avoid the unpleasant. They can smell with their antennae, and so follow trails, find food and recognise their own colony.
An ant's antennae are highly sensitive and contain both touch and smell organs. Each ant colony has a unique smell, so members recognize each other and sniff out intruders. All ants can produce pheromones, which are scent chemicals used for communication and to make trails.
In the insect world, it's usually butterflies that are associated with social behavior, but according to a new study it's ants that really can't live without their peers … literally. Discovery News reports that ants died after just 6 days of isolation, whereas the socially integrated controls lived for up to 66 days.
Ants become the pallbearer
After a few days the dead ant is carried off and placed on the “ant graveyard” by the other dead ants. This may seem like ants have complex feelings and need a few days to grieve before they dispose of the body, but in reality it's far more chemical than that.
In fact, there's mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of feelings. They can be literally buzzing with delight at pleasant surprises, or sink into depression when bad things happen that are out of their control.
Social insects communicate mouth-to-mouth. If you've ever watched ants, you've probably noticed their tendency to "kiss," quickly pressing their mouths together in face-to-face encounters. That's how they feed each other and their larvae.
Ants are very loyal to their own colony, but they can be quite nasty toward outsiders. Competition among colonies for food and other resources often leads to aggression. Many species establish a territory around their nest that is off-limits to neighboring ants.
Just as humans, the ants use body language to communicate things. They can tell the other ants things by lightly touching or stroking the receiver in different ways. This way, they can combine signals of pheromones with that of touch and body language, providing an advanced form of communication.
It is advised not to squash ants, doing so will only release pheromones and trigger more ants to come to the location and cause more trouble to you and your family. Ants are known to pack a deadly bite that causes excruciating pain for a short time.
Killing ants will, definitely, attract more ants because the dead ants release pheromones that attract or rather alert, nearby ants.
Workers serve as undertakers in mature ant colonies, removing dead individuals and carrying them to a trash pile either far away or in a specialized chamber of the nest.
When two colonies of the same AA species meet and contact each other they very quickly recognize that they have met up with members of another group. Instead of fighting, both colonies retreat in opposite directions, away from each other.
Ants quickly and reliably recognize who belongs to the colony (nestmates) and who is an outsider (non-nestmates) based on chemical recognition cues (cuticular hydrocarbons: CHCs) which as a whole constitute a chemical label.
Many people are surprised to learn that ants sometimes fight each other. These fights are quite fierce and sometimes do not end until the body of one ant is so damaged, the ant dies. Ants fight for many reasons.
In ant society, workers normally give up reproducing themselves to care for their queen's offspring, who are their brothers and sisters. When workers try to cheat and have their own kids in the queen's presence, their peers swiftly attack and physically restrain them from reproducing.
Every summer, blood-red ants of the species Formica sanguinea go on a mission to capture slaves. They infiltrate the nest of another ant species, like the peaceful F. fusca, assassinate the queen, and kidnap the pupae to raise as the next generation of slaves.
Ant brains are divided into many small bits, known as ganglia. Each ganglia acts like a mini data processor.
When the ants are crushed, a unique odor becomes detectable; some describe the smell as rotten coconut, others say it smells like ammonia. They are polygenic (multiple queens within one colony), which allows them to grow their colonies at an incredible rate; a single colony can have as many as 10,000 workers.
Why Do Odorous House Ants Smell When You Kill Them? Odorous house ants release a chemical compound that is very similar to those emitted by rotting food, or more specifically, the penicillin mold that causes these foods to rot. Research by entomologists Clint A.
Scent (Pheromones)
The most important way that ants communicate with other colony members is through unique chemicals called pheromones. Using their antenna to “smell” the pheromones, ants can communicate everything from colony activity to where food is located.
Ant colonies can be considered as one single thinking mind, but an individual ant does not possess much intelligence at all. According to Deborah M. Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University, ants cannot accomplish many tasks as individuals because they are too inept.
While ants with normal receptors continued to recognize and fight ants from other colonies, ants with blocked or over-activated receptors displayed dramatically reduced aggressive behavior. “Accepting friends and rejecting foes is one of the most important decisions an ant worker must make,” said Ferguson.
Ants play an important role in the environment. Ants turn and aerate the soil, allowing water and oxygen to reach plant roots. Ants take seeds down into their tunnel to eat the nutritious elaiosomes that are part of the seed.