All these variations assist us see ants as they are surely: wealthy in range, earned over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution as they tailored to a world’s value of habitats, ecosystems and survival methods. Dr. Rice calls ants “the Bauhaus creations of the pure world.” Just like the architectural precept that kind follows perform, every strange-looking adaptation represents a significant dedication in creatures with “little area for extravagance” and so illustrates one more of the multitudinous ways in which there are to be an ant. “To reply the query posed by an ant’s kind,” Dr. Rice writes, “is to start to untangle the intricate relationships that scaffold our world.”
The naturalist and creator Edward O. Wilson found this early in his scientific profession, when a mentor despatched him a notice a couple of group of ants with unusual, lengthy mandibles that would spring shut like traps. (“Wilson, discover out what dacetines eat,” he wrote. “What do they hunt and catch creeping round with these bizarre mandibles?”) A query about morphology grew to become a clue a couple of meals net. The ants, it turned out, have been consuming springtails, a sort of hexapod that may fling itself quickly by the air to keep away from predators, however not shortly sufficient to outrun the unimaginable velocity of the ants’ jaws. It was a race, Dr. Wilson wrote in “Tales From the Ant World”: “every utilizing its personal explosive units, one to seize, the opposite to keep away from seize.” Mr. Niga’s pictures present trap-jaw ants with mandibles like scimitars or lobster claws; some can shut their jaws in just one-tenth of a millisecond, slamming shut at speeds reaching 145 miles per hour.
We additionally meet Cataglyphis bicolor, with its lengthy, spidery legs — a useful adaptation in case you reside, as this ant does, within the Sahara and want velocity and peak to maintain you cool above the blazing sand. (For Oecophylla smaragdina, or weaver ants, lengthy legs serve a unique goal: spanning gaps within the tree cover as they assemble nests of leaves and silk.) Leaf-cutter ants look fierce, their our bodies lined in spines and spikes, however all that armor is supposed not for combating however, in impact, as a gardening instrument. The ants are agriculturalists, ferrying meals to the fungus that they domesticate in elaborate underground chambers, and the spikes permit them to raised steadiness their leafy hundreds. Within the tropics, they work in such diligent numbers which you could see the ant highways that their tiny ant ft put on into forest flooring.
Studying the methods of ants teaches us that their lives are very completely different from our personal. The ants we encounter in our personal lives are nearly solely feminine; the males are, in Dr. Wilson’s phrases, “little greater than flying sperm missiles” that don’t reside lengthy and are sometimes unrecognizable as ants in any respect. Queens are made, not born; fertilized eggs have the potential to be queens or staff, and can develop in a different way based mostly on what the teen is fed as she grows, a food plan and a future that will probably be dictated by the wants of the colony. Ants even have an unusually excessive variety of odor receptors, which permit them to decode chemical trails and messages. Some species even have three easy light-detecting eyes, known as ocelli, to assist them fly and navigate, along with the usual two compound eyes.
There are numerous causes to know ants higher. Complete ecosystems are constructed round them, and huge numbers of species, from vegetation to beetles to birds, are “ant obligates,” that means that they rely completely on their relationships with ant colonies to outlive. Winnow ants disperse so many herbaceous seeds in North America, Dr. Rice notes, that “eradicating them causes wildflower abundance to drop by 50 %.”
Dikkat: Sitemiz herkese açık bir platform olduğundan, çox fazla kişi paylaşım yapmaktadır. Sitenizden izinsiz paylaşım yapılması durumunda iletişim bölümünden bildirmeniz yeterlidir.
Supply: NYTimes