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A black drongo in a typical anting posture. Anting is a maintenance behavior during which birds rub insects, usually ants, on their feathers and skin.The bird may pick up the insects in its bill and rub them on the body (active anting), or the bird may lie in an area of high density of the insects and perform dust bathing-like movements (passive anting).
There are five main types of agriculture that fungus-growing ants practice: [9] Lower, coral fungi, yeast, generalized higher, and leafcutter agricultural systems.Lower agriculture is the most primitive system and is currently practiced by 80 species in 10 genera.
Leafcutter ants are any of at least 55 species [1] [2] [3] of leaf-chewing ants belonging to the three genera Atta, Acromyrmex, and Amoimyrmex, within the tribe Attini. [4] These species of tropical, fungus-growing ants are all endemic to South and Central America, Mexico, and parts of the southern United States. [5]
Most organisms forage, hunt, or use photosynthesis to get food, but around 50 million years ago — long before humans were around — ants began cultivating and growing their own food.
Birds that follow ants eat many prey insects and thus decrease the foraging success of ants. [198] Birds indulge in a peculiar behaviour called anting that, as yet, is not fully understood. Here birds rest on ant nests, or pick and drop ants onto their wings and feathers; this may be a means to remove ectoparasites from the birds.
Juvenile Iberian green woodpecker eating ants. Myrmecophagy is found in several land-dwelling vertebrate taxa, including reptiles and amphibians (horned lizards and blind snakes, narrow-mouthed toads of the family Microhylidae and poison frogs of the Dendrobatidae), a number of New World bird species (Antbirds, Antthrushes, Antpittas, flicker of genus Colaptes), and multiple mammalian groups ...
Though workers can also eat the hyphae of the fungi, which is richer in protein, they prefer staphylae and appear to live longer while eating them. [35] [68] [69] Cellulose has been found to be poorly degraded and assimilated by fungus, if at all, meaning that the ants that eat the fungus do not get much energy from the cellulose in plants.
Honey ants are unique in using their own bodies as living storage, used later by their fellow ants when food is otherwise scarce. When the liquid stored inside a honeypot ant is needed, the worker ants stroke the antennae of the honeypot ant, causing the honeypot ant to regurgitate the stored liquid from its crop. [4] [5]