Nature's Wonders: August 2011

Saturday 6 August 2011

Animal Xploration- Issue 4

Ants in Action!

This guy's Atom Ant.

G'day mates! I'm Annie the Ant, and I live in some-person-who-loves-candies' house. Everyday, my whole entire colony would just sneak-, I meant PART of my colony, and I, a worker ant would sneak out of the cupboard (Our home) and grab a bunch of crumbs and run. My favourite sweet is the strawberry flavoured lollipop which the house's owner buys every week. Ants live EVERYWHERE. Ok, maybe not exactly EVERYWHERE, except on glaciers, in mountains and at the poles. Guess what? There are ten MILLION BILLION ants on Earth! There are about 10, 000 known ant species round the world. Ants' sizes range from 0.1cm to 5cm, which is really a big difference.

Now, let's get started on how the entire colony of ants work. All the ants in the ants' nest need each other and are all ready to give up their lives for their colony. They only can survive as a group. Here are a bunch of cool fun facts about us ants. When 2 ants meet, they actually tap each other's legs and antennae. They also recognise shapes and scents of each other, the way they know they know they are from the same colony. Nope. Ants don't speak, but the meaning of this action is, "Hey, are you actually one of us?"

When a worker ant comes back to its home (well, the nest), the other hungry worker ants left in the nest would stroke the worker ant's head. Then it opens its mandibles, the 'fancy way' of saying jaws, and regurgitates (uh, vomit??? Meaning bringing back the food up into its mouth) a drop of liquid from its 'first stomach', which also can be called crop. This means something like, "Give me some food, please!" This regurgitated liquid is partly made of food that the ant had collected from outside the nest. One drop of this weird liquid actually contains lots, and lots, and lots (x10) of information! Each and every ant which receives this liquid analyses its chemical composition. This is one of the ways a message is passed through the colony.

When I feels under attack, I shoot a jet of formic acid which can shoot out to a height of 50cm! Other ants pick up the scent of the formic acid with their antennae, then they rush to the rescue, meanwhile also shooting out their own jets of acid.