Kinds of Ants – Page 19 – Wild About Ants

November 10, 2009November 11, 2009

Ant Structures With GPS Addresses

Foresters are set to log the ancient Holystone Forest, in Northumberland, England. But first they need to locate and save a few homes located in the forest. Are these structures human dwellings? No, they are giant ant mounds.

The northern, or hairy wood ants (Formica lugubris) build towering mounds out of pine needles, from three to seven feet tall. The nests act as solar collectors and heaters, allowing wood ants to live in places too cold for most other ants. In addition, the large black and red workers sometimes bask in the sun to warm up and then move underground to act as living heat radiators.

wood-ant-mound — Smaller wood ant mound from Switzerland

The hairy wood ants that build the mounds are now endangered, and every effort is being to made to protect them. Naturalists located of 69 mounds, which they mapped and gave GPS coordinates. Hopefully, the maps will help the loggers avoid getting too close.

For photographs and more information, see:
Guardian.co.uk has a story: Giant ants’ nests given special building protection

York Dales Country News story: GPS used to protect ant ‘skyscrapers’

For photos and more information, see BBC – Potter ponders giant anthill

Edit: And for children, see The Ant’s Nest book review at Simply Science.

November 9, 2009November 9, 2009

Leafcutter Ant Video

Leafcutter ants are exceptional ants. They construct large, complex nests. Each colony has a number of different worker castes performing a wide variety of tasks. Everything about leafcutter ants is done on a big scale.

Leafcutter ants are named for their habit of cutting out pieces of leaves and carrying the slices back to their nest in their mandibles. Workers process the leaves, spread the resulting paste in an underground garden area, and grow a specific species of fungus on it. Rather than eating the leaves, which may contain toxins, the ants eat the fungus instead. In fact, the fungus is so critical to leafcutter ant survival that the queen ants carry a bit of fungus with them when they go on their mating flights.

This video shows leafcutter ants in action.

Let me know what you think of leafcutter ants.

November 4, 2009November 3, 2009

Pogonomyrmex californicus Harvester Ants

While investigating the Dorymyrmex bicolor ants I posted about on Monday, I spotted a few other ants that looked similar, mostly because of their red-brown and black coloration.

harvester-ant

harvester-ant4

On closer observation, however, these ants were obviously another species. First of all, they were almost double the size.

harvster-ant2

The long hairs on the underside of their heads gave it away that these were harvester ants in the genus Pogonomyrmex. The ‘beard” of hairs, called a psammophore, is characteristic of the genus. In fact, the name Pogonomymrex means “bearded one.” Psammo comes from the word for sand in Greek, so the psammophore acts like a basket or an extra pair of hands to help the ants move sand, dirt, and probably some types of food as well.

pogo-californicus

These turned out to be a color variant of Pogonomyrmex californicus. Cole (1968) describes the species as concolorous light ferrugineous red in coastal California, moving to concolorous black or brown to the eastern part of its range in southern Texas.

Ants of the Southwest has a good page about these harvester ants that shows some of the the color variations.

It seems that Dorymyrmex bicolor and Pogonomyrmex californicus are often found in the same open, arid environments. It’s interesting that at this Maricopa, AZ site their coloration is so similar.

November 2, 2009November 1, 2009