Some Details About Ants
Everybody has lived with ants in the house or and the garden all his or her life. Wherever people live, ants live too, except in Antartica and a few islands, but how much do you really know about them?
Ants evolved from wasps about 120 million years ago and later, as plant life started to diversify, ants diversified and specialized as well. We do not know how many species of ants there are, but it is reckoned that there are about 22,000. Of those, 12,500 odd have been classified, so there is still a fantastic deal that we do not know about ants.
In spite of the large number of species they all have a distinctive shape: a node-like formation with a very slender, wasp-like waist. Ants are insects and they live in nests from a few dozen to many million individuals. The majority of these individuals are sterile female workers and soldiers.
There are also a few males, known as drones, for reproduction purposes and one or more fertile, egg-laying queens. There will also be a support group of reproductive females who can turn into workers or queens as the colony requires.
Ants are capable of functioning together to resolve honestly complex social or environmental difficulties and they have been a source of inspiration to human societies for centuries.
Termites are often called ‘white ants’, but in fact they are not at all related to ants. They are more closely related to cockroaches. The fact that termites and ants share a number of characteristics is attributed to convergent evolution.
Ants are extremely successful creatures. They make up about twenty percent of the total land-based biomass and that exceeds the biomass of vertebrates. Most ants will eat anything although some species have specialized. There is a huge variation in size. Some varieties are only three-quarters of a millimetre long while others are fifty-two millimetres in length, which is two inches long!
Ants have jointed antennae unlike the majority of other insects and the majority of of them have very poor eyesight, some are even blind, but certainly not all. Some ants have brilliant vision. They do not breathe as we do, but gases passes through their exoskeleton (hard external skin) by means of valves. They do not have a heart as such either but they do have nerves. Some ants, such as the fire ant, have stings like their primordial ancestors the wasps.
Ants come from eggs, but the eggs do not have to be fertilized: fertilized eggs become female and unfertilized develop into male. Ant nurse workers can influence which caste of ant an egg will make by the type of food it gives it. Ant eggs need a constant temperature, so nurse workers will often go the eggs from chamber to chamber to keep it right.
When an ant hatches out, it is given simple duties like looking after the queen and the eggs for a few days and then it is went on to digging and cleaning the nest. The ants that go out looking for food are the older ants. It is reckoned that they are given this work because it is perilous and they will more than likely die of natural causes soon anyway.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on quite a few topics, but is at present concerned with how to kill fire ants. If you want to know more or check out some fantastic offers, please go to our website at Killing Carpenter Ants.
