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Most ant species will send individual scouts to find food sources and later recruit others from the colony to help; however, army ants dispatch a cooperative, leaderless group of foragers to detect and overwhelm the prey at once. [3] [5] Army ants do not have a permanent nest but instead form many bivouacs as they travel.
Eciton burchellii is a species of New World army ant in the genus Eciton. This species performs expansive, organized swarm raids that give it the informal name, Eciton army ant. [2] This species displays a high degree of worker polymorphism. Sterile workers are of four discrete size-castes: minors, medias, porters (sub-majors), and soldiers ...
There are ant-mimicking staphylinid beetles, shaped like the ants they follow, that run with the swarm, some of them preying on stragglers or other insects injured or flushed by army-ant activity, though most of these are inquilines in the ant nest; these and other insects sometimes spend their entire lives hidden in Eciton colonies, often ...
Local arthropod densities remain stable even in the presence of a foraging colony of the ants, in sharp contrast to the decimation a colony of typical army ants imposes on local arthropods.2 Above ground foraging driver and army ants have been observed collecting upwards of 90,000 insects per day in their raids, a number which Even juvenile ...
Like their name, major ants serve as the colony’s military force and defend the nest. Some major ants can grow 16mm long, which is pretty big for an ant! Mutualism Between Ants and Fungi.
Males leave the colony soon after hatching but are drawn to the scent trail left by a column of siafu once they reach sexual maturity. When a colony of driver ants encounters a male, they tear his wings off and carry him back to the nest to be mated with a recently hatched queen. As in the majority of ant species, males die shortly afterward. [4]
An unusual ant colony has been documented in a recently published study. The population lives in an old bunker that was used to house nuclear weapons.
Colonies of real army ants have only one queen, so when she dies, the workers may try to join another colony, or the rest of the colony also dies; Carebara colonies can have many (up to 16) queens. Carebara species perform a nuptial flight; real army-ant queens have no wings (queens and workers of the Dorylus species are even blind) and mate on ...