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.
This “kiss” tells the other ant the needs of the colony and what job it should be doing. Ants also communicate by smelling each other or tapping and stroking their bodies to determine what must be done next.
Bumping into each other is another way ants correspond. When ants want to alert others about something that could be useful to their colony, they use their antennas to touch or “bump” other ants to pick up their scent. This lets them smell the unique scent of each ant before informing them of their discovery.
A species of ant has become the first known non-human animal to tend the wounds of its fellows. “Nurse” ants lick the wounds of fallen comrades, and this helps them survive.
Therefore, it's of the utmost importance for ants to be able to identify and cooperate with other ants from their colonies. Therefore, when two ants collide, or meet each other head-on, they smell each other thoroughly to make sure that they belong to the same colony.
Turns out ants don't really mourn or grieve or even have graveyards for the same reasons we as humans do. It all comes down to chemicals and smells and pheromones.
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.
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.
Many ants can release special chemicals into the air that other ants can sense and respond to. These chemicals are called pheromones (FAIR-UH-MONES). Ants are famous in the world of biology for using pheromones to warn other ants about danger or guide them to food.
Sperm contains sugar molecules, like every cell in one's body. The extra sugars secreted in semen add to the effect. Ants can drink from fresh and sugary liquid to gain energy, and prefer sugar to keep themselves up and moving. Though it may be gross, ants might drink semen and gain nutrition from it.
It is likely to lack key features such as 'distress', 'sadness', and other states that require the synthesis of emotion, memory and cognition. In other words, insects are unlikely to feel pain as we understand it.
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. In certain species, they will bury the corpse instead.
A paper published in Current Biology demonstrates that ants can find their way home, even while travelling backwards or spinning around. "Our main finding is that ants can decouple their direction of travel from their body orientation," Antoine Wystrach, from the University of Edinburgh, said.
Carpenter ants 'throw up' on each other to say hello
As well as communicating via pheromones, sound and touch, ants talk to each other by exchanging liquid mouth-to-mouth in a process called trophallaxis.
Ants have 10-20 chemical "words" that allow them to identify ants from their own species, show others where food is at, or raise a call of alarm when there's danger. An ant uses its antenna for most of the communication it does with other ants.
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.
Army ants have very few means of communication relative to humans. Visually, they can tell night from day and distinguish almost nothing more than that. They can't even form an image of the world around them, relying on their senses of smell and touch for detecting vibrations.
They will assume you are a threat, not a food, and even after you die they may ignore you, as ants are not usually attracted to large mammal cadavers compared to, say, corpse flies.
Despite the relative smallness of an ant's brain in comparison to humans, scientists consider the ant to have the largest brain of all insects. Regardless of how ant brains are rated, they can communicate, avoid and fight enemies, search for food, show courtship signals, and use complex navigation over long distances.
Animals, including ants, have specialized sensory neurons that detect and alert them to harmful stimuli, such as temperature, pressure, or chemical changes. These pain-sensing neurons are called nociceptors.
Many common species of ants release pungent smells when they are in danger, squished, or otherwise dead, according to Clint Penick, an assistant professor at Kennesaw State University and ant researcher.
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.
Ants learn very rapidly, their memory lasts up to 3 days, decreases slowly over time and is highly resistant to extinction, even after a single conditioning trial. Using a pharmacological approach, we show that this single-trial memory critically depends on protein synthesis (long-term memory).
One study found that three species, Myrmica rubra, Myrmica ruginodis, and Myrmica sabuleti have shown potential for self-recognition (Cammaerts and Cammaerts, 2015). When exposed to a mirror, ants of all three species marked with a blue dot would attempt to clean themselves by touching the mark.
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.