Ants immunise their young

As I’ve mentioned before, living in a large densely-packed social group, like a city or an ant colony, comes with some drawbacks – perhaps worst of which is the risk of catching a contagious diseases. Earlier this year I wrote about research showing that raider ants treat injured workers’ wounds, helping them to heal. Now, a new study shows that the queen can pass on resistance to diseases she’s encountered, arming her workers against pathogens.

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The Ant Doctor Will See you Now

I’ve spent more time than most observing ants, and I’ve come to find them ‘cute’ – something few other people understand, and that is often hard to convey. So it’s nice to find a paper that offers the opportunity to give people a glimpse into the cuteness I see in ant behaviour.

Ants clean the wounds of injured nest mates, often saving their lives and keeping infection out of the colony.

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CRISPR MutAnts Lose Interest in Socialising

New gene editing technologies have revolutionised genetic science, but social insects like ants have proved difficult to genetically modify because of their complex lifecycle and social structure. Now, two separate labs have succeeded in using the CRISPR-CAS9 system to genetically modify two unusual ant species, switching off genes and disrupting their social behaviour in the process.
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Social Supergene is a Green Beard for Fire Ants

Scientists have found the final missing link answering a long-standing question about how social behaviour evolves. New research shows that a social supergene in fire ants coordinates a host of biological processes and behaviours, that ultimately determine how sociable their colonies are, and who they choose to be their queen.

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The Ants Who Store Our Carbon

As we are very rapidly discovering, living creatures have the ability to drastically alter the climate and weather systems on Earth, and the greatest changes are achieved by the species that are greatest in number. Ants may be no exception to this rule, and recent geological research suggests that ants may be providing a vital counter-balance to our CO2 emitting ways. Ants may be cooling the climate as we warm it. But are ants the solution to climate change?

Ants and Climate Change

A recent study published in Geology has begun to reveal the role ants play in keeping Earth’s atmosphere cool. They might be small, but ants are ubiquitous on Earth, found on every continent except Antarctica and numbering over 15,000 species. They have the potential to have a big impact. The study published this month showed that ants collect minerals from their environment and change them into rock, inadvertently trapping carbon dioxide gas in the rock as they do so. This process is identical to the way in which atmospheric CO2 is sequestered by the oceans, and naturally weathered on land.

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Selfish Strategies in Cooperative Society

Social insects show extraordinarily high levels of cooperation, giving up their reproductive opportunities and even sacrificing their own lives to save the colony. The social insect colony is a well-oiled machine, each part has its own key role to play, together forming an intelligent and adaptive society. Most people are familiar with the highly advanced social insects, such as honeybees and leaf cutter ants. Their societies are huge and intricate, and we have gained many fascinating insights from them. However, they tell us very little about how these societies evolved, or what it meant to be cooperative in a more primitive sense.

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Ants: Civilisation in Minature III

Crime and Punishment

Ant societies are remarkably complex and ants exhibit extremely high levels of cooperation. Workers will often sacrifice their own lives to defend the safety of the nest. However, just like human societies, ant nests are also rife with conflict. Where there is cooperation there will always be individuals who try to take advantage and cheat the system.

The defining characteristic of ant colonies (and social insects in general) is reproductive division of labour, where reproduction is dominated by one or a few individuals, known as queens. In this matriarchal system, reproduction is forbidden for most colony members, and in many ant species worker ants are physically incapable of mating. Despite being unable to mate, due to their unusual genetic system, ant workers can still lay male eggs. This gives them the opportunity to try and cheat the system, and in many ant species workers have been found to illicitly try and lay eggs, when the queen isn’t looking. Such crimes do not go unpunished, however, and in many species the honest workers will punish cheaters, either through physical aggression, or by destroying the illegally laid eggs.

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Ants: Civilisation in Miniature II

Agriculture
They might seem simple and insignificant, but like humans, ants have discovered the benefits, and costs of agriculture. In the ant world there are species which farm livestock, protecting them from predators and milking them for rich nectar, and others which cultivate tiny underground fields of fungus, pruning it and using chemicals to prevent disease and pests.

Crops and Livestock

Humans developed farming around 10,000 years ago, but the ants have been at it much longer. In its simplest form, ant farming consists of simply pruning the surrounding forest. Ants of one species found in the Amazonian rainforest have been found to remove unwanted plant species when they appear in its foraging area. Although simple, this ‘weeding’ behaviour can be devastating, with ants clearing huge sections of forest of any species which is not beneficial to them.

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Ants: Civilisation in Miniature

You might not think you have much in common with the small, six-legged creatures that occasionally break into your home to raid jam jars, but over the next three articles I hope to illuminate some of the parallels between people and ants. Like humans, ants are highly social; building civilisations, utilising sophisticated mechanisms of communication, and nurturing other living creatures in various forms of agriculture. And just like us, their societies are sometimes compromised by cheats and criminals. Ants share many of these traits with other members of the social hymenoptera, which includes most bees and wasps. Few species outside this group have developed cooperation as sophisticated or complex.
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