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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.
Established by French zoologist Pierre André Latreille in 1809, the subfamily has more than 3,000 described species, placing it as the second largest ant subfamily. Despite this, the hyperdiverse genus Camponotus is the most diverse group of ants in the world, with more than 1,100 species described. [41] [110]
Nearly all ant colonies also have some fertile males called "drones" and one or more fertile females called "queens" . 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.
Ants first arose during the mid-Cretaceous, more than 100 million years ago, associated with the rise of flowering plants and an increase in forest ground litter. [5] The earliest known ants evolved from a lineage within the aculeate wasps, and a recent study suggests that they are a sister group of Apoidea. [6]
The wasps, bees, and ants together make up the suborder (and clade) Apocrita, characterized by a constriction between the first and second abdominal segments called a wasp-waist , also involving the fusion of the first abdominal segment to the thorax. Also, the larvae of all Apocrita lack legs, prolegs, or ocelli.
The name army ant (or legionary ant or marabunta [1]) is applied to over 200 ant species in different lineages. Because of their aggressive predatory foraging groups, known as "raids", a huge number of ants forage simultaneously over a limited area.
The latest curiosity is a video that surfaced on YouTube showing a phone placed on the ground where a group of ants is moving randomly. When the phone receives an incoming call, the ants start ...
see also Winkler extraction device used to extract ants and other living organism from soil and leaf-litter samples; a sample is placed on a screen with a funnel beneath, and a heat source above; the drying forces the animals downwards, where they fall into a collecting jar, usually filled with alcohol bivouac in army and driver ants, nest formed by the bodies of the ants themselves to protect ...