Walking is a major part of a human’s life. We walk constantly, while drinking water, consuming food or while pondering on various happenings, but we never stop to think about the organism that we walk over, beside or on, the ant. At first glance, ants may not seem to be extremely important and interesting. We often write them off as insignificant in size and irrelevance, but in reality, ants are some of the most fascinating creatures to ever exist on Earth. In this blog, I shall attempt to explain the wonderous, exhilarating, and fascinating science of ants.
Ants have lived on this planet for millions of years. Specifically, ants evolved from Vespoid wasps in the Jurassic period. They lived along with the Allosaurus and Stegosaurus. Ants have a few characteristic features, such as their geniculate antennae and their arthropodal-like appendage bodies. Due to these features, ants fall under Phylum Arthropoda.
Ants form colonies which are made up of ants that originate from a similar colony and ants that are part of the same species. Since these colonies act as one unit, we call ant colonies “superorganisms.” They are part of a small portion of the organisms of the world that can work like superorganisms. Ants are quite similar to humans in terms of assigning roles. Ants can be further classified into Queen ants, Worker ants and Drones. Interestingly, all ants start off the same. They are not born with their roles, and they all initially are larvae. However, they start developing differently as they grow based on the nutrition given to them. Queens are given the most nutrition since the queen must be the largest ant and must also produce the most offspring. Workers are given less nutrition in comparison to the queen ants. Workers mainly help in the development, maintenance, and protection of their colonies, like a worker. Both Queens and Workers start off the same and are females. Drones on the other hand are different. They come from unfertilized eggs produced by a Queen and are born male. Their sole purpose is to mate with a Queen during nuptial flights. This mechanism of change in genetic information of an ant because a different type of food is given is still unknown and is being researched on.
There are thousands of species of ants. We have estimated that there are around 22,000 species of ants, out of which nearly 14,000 have been discovered. These species range from architects like the Weaver ants to the Army ants which are anatomically engineered to take strain and penetrate the skin of ants.
Ants are some of the most fascinating creatures on this planet and I hope that you have found these organisms to be more interesting than they appear.
A Weaver Ant
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