2022-01-27 20:13:05
Everything that José Manuel Vidal, author of the book “Las Hormigas”, recounts in Hablando con Científicos is, to say the least, surprising. And the first thing that surprises is the enormous number of known species of these insects, around 13,500 worldwide, not counting the more than 750 known fossil species, because they have been on the planet for more than one hundred million years. To study this enormous diversity, there is a whole branch of entomology called “myrmecology”, a word that comes from myrmex, the name given by the ancient Greeks to ants, and from there also comes the name “myrmidons”, the warrior people to which the legendary Achilles belonged, who, according to Greek mythology, descended from ants transformed by Zeus into humans.
Beyond distant mythological legends, the truth is that ants have proven to be extraordinarily successful beings and the proof of this is that they inhabit all of the Earth’s continents, except Antarctica, and we find them in all terrestrial habitats, the mountains, jungles, deserts and, to the despair of many of us, anywhere in the house where they can pick up food scraps.
One of the most important characteristics of ants is their social organization. In this regard, José Manuel Vidal comments in his book what the myrmecologist Mark W. Moffet said “Humans are more like ants than chimpanzees” What primate, apart from us, has to deal with public health problems? , road construction or merchandise distribution? To answer this question, José Manuel gives multiple examples that show that these tireless insects developed abilities long before us that make us proud as a social species.
Before we invented agriculture, ants already gathered, planted and harvested. We have seen many times in the field a trail of ants that transport seeds to the anthill, where they store and consume them. Just as we eat fruit and despise seeds, many plants offer ants a tasty part of the fruit in exchange for depositing the seed on their nutrient-rich waste heap, where new plants germinate and emerge. The most surprising example is the behavior of ants of the genus Atta, whose workers cut and transport pieces of leaves to the anthill where they crush them and mix them with their saliva to create a substrate on which a fungus grows on which they feed. Agriculture has no secrets for them.
And neither does livestock. Certain species of ants herd a flock of aphids, close relatives of bedbugs that feed on plant sap, just as our shepherds care for their sheep. The ants carry the aphids from one plant to another and preferentially place them on the young shoots where they feed better and the aphids appreciate their services by secreting honeydew, a sugary substance that delights their keepers. Just as the shepherd milks his sheep and goats, the ants tap the aphids with their antennae so that they excrete the delicious nectar.
Among so many species of ants as they are known, we could say that there are for all tastes, shapes and sizes. Some have a sting, like wasps, and use it to immobilize their prey, others instead of the sting have developed other appendages that they use for different purposes. There are some that have an atrophied head and use it in a surprising way, this is the case of the genus Cephalotes, whose disc-shaped head is so large that it is used as a stopper to block the entrance to the anthill when they detect an external threat. And, there is no lack of mouth appendages of the most varied and strange shapes, some species use them as powerful springs with which they can pierce a caterpillar to extract fluids, others, on the other hand, are capable of using them as delicate and precise tools with which that remove the hairs one by one from certain caterpillars like someone plucking a chicken.
The conversation with José Manuel Vidal goes far beyond the examples given above. The researcher comments that the division of labor, the organization by castes and the cooperation that are fundamental in any society of ants. It tells the extraordinary and dangerous journey of a flying queen until she manages to found a new colony. During that nuptial flight it is the only time in her life that she copulates and stores the sperm inside her to gradually use it to fertilize the eggs for the rest of her life. Thus begins an odyssey during which, after laying the first eggs, workers are born, which will then be in charge of caring for the queen and her successive generations. Thus, from a queen, or several depending on the species, a whole society of ants originates, some of them physically differentiated according to their mission despite being daughters of the same mother, through chemical communication systems between individuals, or even Sonora will be in charge of creating and expanding the anthill, taking care of the new generations, collecting food, storing, defense actions, etc. You can hear all of this and much more in this chapter of the Hablando con Científicos podcast and, in even greater depth, by reading the book Las Hormigas where the author and interviewee masterfully shows us the fascinating world of myrmecology.
José Manuel Vidal is a researcher in the department of ethology and biodiversity conservation of the Biological Station of Doñana del CSIC.
References:
The Ants Book
Blog of José M. Vidal Cordero.
José M. Vidal Cordero’s personal space
The Ant Ecology Group
The ants star in the new popularization book of the CSIC
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