The Great British picnic is one of my favourite traditions – nothing says British summer like sitting on an itchy checked blanket in National Trust gardens with a wicker picnic hamper full of nicely cut sandwiches and still lemonade (sometimes I have to remind myself I’m not starring in an Enid Blyton novel.) Unfortunately, nothing says Great British picnic more than running away from a wasp attack and watching a line of ants eye up your pork pie crumbs. Somebody forgot to tell the insects that they weren’t actually invited (how rude and very un-British to turn up unannounced without even chipping in a side dish.)
When you think about it, maybe it’s our own fault? Who can blame the visiting insects for wanting to try the exotic buffet you’ve provided right on their front doorstep. It’s not long before you will inevitably give up trying to fend off the insect attack and sit back and watch.
And when you actually start to watch the picnic ant army carefully, you see just how impressive they really are. There’s a line of teeny, tiny ants carrying pieces of crisp more than twice their size quite comfortably away into the distance. But what happens when you drop a whole crisp? Do these poor little ants admit defeat and crawl back to the nests empty handed? Of course not! Ants are pro weight-lifting champions. A whole ready salted crisp – challenge accepted – but not without the help of a few friends. Luckily for ants, teamwork is part of everyday life and it doesn’t take them long to attract other ants to help carry or break down a large food item.
The behaviour of ants to carry items much larger than themselves is very well known. One of the best studied examples is that of the leaf-cutters. I’m sure we’ve all seen trails of moving pieces of leaves being guided by a line of ants underneath. Leaf-cutter worker ants do spend an awful lot of time gardening – a large colony can consume as much vegetation as a cow! The funny thing is leaf-cutter ants don’t actually eat leaves. The workers take the leaves back to the nest, clean them and chew them so they’re soft and moist before using them as ant-compost on which to grow a fungus garden. The fungi that grow in this carefully managed garden produce balls at the end of each of their fungal threads, which are rich in tasty protein. It’s this protein that the ants are keen to get their mandibles on and the workers use it to feed their developing larvae.
Harvesting and moving the leaves is a truly great example of teamwork in ants. The workers cut the leaves by anchoring their legs on to them and using their mandibles like blades to slice them. These are then transported back to the nest, but the workers aren’t alone. The trails are patrolled by large solider ants with fierce looking mandibles to keep predators away and tiny ants, call minima, ride on the tops of the leaves to ward off parasitic flies. It really is all hands on deck.
You may think the Queen is in charge but in these societies everyone has an extremely important role to complete. The Queen lays her eggs and leaves them in the very capable hands of the worker ants. You are certainly not born with a silver spoon in your mouth in these colonies as all ants start off as equals when they’re eggs. So how do you rise to the sunny heights of the colony to become a Queen over a worker? Interestingly research has suggested it’s the workers that decide what you will become as they control what goes into your stomach. In the ant world a change of diet – such as a change from insects to seeds – can determine just how big you’ll be. The bigger the ant the more likely you are to become a solider or maybe even a queen so there is no such thing as dieting for these creatures! Ants have got this so finely tuned that the workers will respond to their environment and control the castes in order for the colony to thrive. For example, when the colony is threatened, they’ll ensure more soldiers are produced! Pretty clever, eh?
There are a couple of particular fantastic examples that show just how much ants depend on each other that I wanted to share with you..
Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire ants
When obstacles get in the way, ants don’t back down. There’s example of colonies making living bridges of ants over pools of water so the rest of the colony can get safely across. Fire ants have also come up with a pretty nifty way of surviving through floods. They build tiny ant rafts, literally tiny rafts made out of ants! They grab onto their nestmates and interlock like blocks of Lego to form a single ball of fire ants. Their skin repels water and they trap a layer of air around their bodies to form an air pocket. They’ll happily float along and wait for the flood to pass.
Never leave an ant behind
I hate being underground. The thought of being trapped makes me panic – the tunnel scenes in The Great Escape may be the scariest moment of any film for me. Unfortunately, many ants choose to build their colonies underground and sometimes the worst happens- a tunnel collapses leaving an ant buried (these poor ants are living out my worst nightmare.) Luckily for these ants, help is at hand. Ants rub certain parts of their body together to produce a sound, or an alarm call to their nestmates. This is called stridulation. For ants that find themselves buried underground, they stridulate to ‘call’ ants to help. Their nestmates willingly respond, finding the place the ant is buried and they will dig intensively until their friend is free.
It’s been some time since I wrote about my favourites and I started to worry they’d feel neglected if I left it any longer. I’m glad they’re back. I hope I’m starting to show you there’s a lot more to these insects than the reason your parents used to give when you couldn’t sit still as a child.
Guess what I know? 