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Ants communicating through touch. Ant communication in most species involves pheromones, which is a method using chemical trails for other ants or insects to find and follow. [1] However, ants of some species can communicate without using pheromones or chemical trails in general.
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.
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.
The army ants of South America, such as the Eciton burchellii species, and the driver ants of Africa do not build permanent nests, but instead, alternate between nomadism and stages where the workers form a temporary nest from their own bodies, by holding each other together.
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 ...
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.
The queen does not give direct orders and does not tell the ants what to do. [citation needed] Instead, each ant reacts to stimuli in the form of chemical scents from larvae, other ants, intruders, food and buildup of waste, and leaves behind a chemical trail, which, in turn, provides a stimulus to other ants. Here each ant is an autonomous ...
Sugar bait with a toxicant, such as boric acid, typically works well, since many ant species that enter homes are sweet-loving ants. This will work slowly as foraging ants take food back to the queen.