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Blobrana


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RE: Formicidae
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Ants use Sun and memories to navigate

Ants are even more impressive at navigating than we thought.
Scientists say they can follow a compass route, regardless of the direction in which they are facing.
It is the equivalent of trying to find your way home while walking backwards or even spinning round and round.
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Blobrana


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Ants in space grapple well with zero-g

Ants carried to the International Space Station were still able to use teamwork to search new areas, despite falling off the walls of their containers for up to eight seconds at a time.
Their "collective search" was hampered but still took place, biologists said.
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Blobrana


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Stanford researchers discover the 'anternet'

On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the "anternet."
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Blobrana


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 Ants in 3D: project begins to image every known species

Scientists are embarking on a mission to capture a 3D image of every ant species known to science.
The US team is visiting museums around the world to photograph all of the ant specimens in their collections.
They are using a technique that, for the first time, allows microscopic anatomical detail of the insects' bodies to be photographed.
The aim is to make an online catalogue called Antweb, providing a unique tool for scientists who study the insects.
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Blobrana


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The world's ants captured in 3D

Scientists from the California Institute of Sciences are embarking on a project to take highly detailed digital images of every one of approximately 12,000 ant species known to science.
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Blobrana


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Almost 50 million years ago, ants the size of hummingbirds roamed what is now Wyoming, a new fossil discovery reveals. These giant bugs may have crossed an Arctic land bridge between Europe and North America during a particularly warm period in Earth's history.
At about 5 cm long, the specimen is a "monstrously big ant," said Bruce Archibald, a paleoentomologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who reported the discovery today (May 3) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Though fossils of loose giant ant wings have been found before in the United States, this is the first known full-body specimen.
The fossil ant is from a well-known fossil site in Wyoming called the Green River Formation, but it had been sitting in a drawer at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Archibald said. When a curator showed him the fossil, Archibald said, he knew he was looking at something exciting.
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Blobrana


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Leafcutter ants
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Leafcutter ants scurry with their harvest of leaves, which they use to fuel huge underground fungus farms. Found only in the New World tropics, leafcutter ants harvest as much as 17 percent of the rainforest leaf production, making them the neotropic's most influential herbivore -- insect or mammal. The genome of the leafcutter has now been sequenced by a team of UW-Madison researchers, revealing that the ant has dispensed with nutrient acquisition genes still found in other ant species.
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Blobrana


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Fossil leaf bears the telltale scars of insects infected by parasitic fungus.

Researchers claim to have found the first evidence of 'zombie' ants in the fossil record. They have matched peculiar cuts on a 48-million-year-old fossil leaf with the 'death bites' made by modern ants infected by a fungal parasite. The research is published today in Biology Letters.
The leaf was part of a group of fossilised leaves and plants unearthed recently from the Messel Pit in Germany's Rhine Rift Valley - an area famous for the discovery, in 2009, of Ida, a well-preserved primate fossil touted as a human ancestor.
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Blobrana


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Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and do not fight one another, as unrelated ants do. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and may rival humans in the scale of its world domination.
In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is believed to stretch for 6,000 kms along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the U.S., known as the "Californian large", extends over 900km along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.
It appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.
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Blobrana


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Ant
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A new species of insect, nicknamed the ant from Mars because of its strange and unique physical characteristics, has been discovered in the Amazon rainforest.
The Martialis heureka ant, a blind predator that lives in soil and grows to between 2mm and 3mm long, was identified as belonging to an entirely new branch that is extremely close in nature to the first ants to evolve.
The ant is so unlike any other that its Latin name means eureka ant from Mars. The name derives from a comment by the renowned biologist E.O.Wilson, who jokingly told the discovery team that the ant looked so strange it must come from Mars. The heureka species epithet, meaning
I've found it, comes from the way that a single specimen was discovered five years after the first examples had been lost.

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