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Ant colonies have a complex social structure. Ants’ jobs are determined and can be changed by age. As ants grow older their jobs move them farther from the queen, or center of the colony. Younger ants work within the nest protecting the queen and young. Sometimes, a queen is not present and is replaced by egg-laying workers.
The colonies are described as superorganisms because the ants appear to operate as a unified entity, collectively working together to support the colony. Ants have colonised almost every landmass on Earth. The only places lacking indigenous ants are Antarctica and a few remote or inhospitable islands.
Because of this, ants are a popular source of inspiration for design in software engineering, robotics, industrial design, and other fields involving many simple parts working together to perform complex tasks. [2] The most popular current model of self-organization in ants and other social insects is the response threshold model.
If you've ever marveled at a team of ants working together to carry a huge morsel of food or navigate around objects, you've seen how effective a collective intelligence made up of simple ...
Weaver ants or green ants are eusocial insects of the Hymenoptera family Formicidae belonging to the tribe Oecophyllini. Weaver ants live in trees (they are obligately arboreal ) and are known for their unique nest building behaviour where workers construct nests by weaving together leaves using larval silk . [ 3 ]
The language these ants use is rather sophisticated: the ants adapt their communication, using shorter messages for frequently used locations and compressing some more regular messages. [4] Using a method based on measuring the time it takes the ants to communicate various messages, it has been shown that they can to use simple arithmetic ...
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.
Some polymorphic ants can have workers who look morphologically very different from each other, with specific jobs and behaviours. [ 1 ] [ 3 ] Examples of these polymorphisms can be seen in the big-headed ants Pheidole dentata, where the different castes of workers (majors with large heads and minors with regular sized heads) increase colony ...