News tagged with ant colonies

Related topics: ants

The zombie-ant fungus is under attack, research reveals

A parasite that fights the zombie-ant fungus has yielded some of its secrets to an international research team led by David Hughes of Penn State University. The research reveals, for the first time, how an ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created May 02, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (4) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

How social contact with sick ants protects their nestmates

In a research article published April 3 in the online, open-access journal PLoS Biology, Prof. Sylvia Cremer and colleagues at the Institute of Science and Technology, Austria show how micro-infections promot ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Apr 03, 2012 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (6) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

Ant colonies remember rivals' odor and compete like sports fans

A new study led by the University of Melbourne has shown that weaver ants share a collective memory for the odour of ants in rival nests, and use the information to identify them and compete, similar to how sports fans know ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Feb 21, 2012 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Mental time-travel in birds

(PhysOrg.com) -- Certain types of birds may track army ant swarms using sophisticated memory and the ability to plan for the future.

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Oct 14, 2011 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (9) | comments 17 | with audio podcast

Vicious queen ants use mob tactics to reach the top

Leptothorax acervorum ants live all over the Northern hemisphere, but their reproductive strategy depends on habitat. Colonies are polygynous (more than one queen) in the forest of Siberia and central Europe, but functionally ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Sep 30, 2011 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

Monogamous queens help bees cooperate

(PhysOrg.com) -- New research published today in Nature Communications online journal suggests that monogamy and close genetic relationships work together to enhance the cooperative social structure of ins ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Jul 20, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Ants give new evidence for interaction networks

Be it through the Internet, Facebook, the local grapevine or the spread of disease, interaction networks influence nearly every part of our lives.

Biology / Plants & Animals

created May 23, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (4) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Evolutionary lessons for wind farm efficiency

Evolution is providing the inspiration for University of Adelaide computer science research to find the best placement of turbines to increase wind farm productivity.

Technology / Energy & Green Tech

created May 04, 2011 | popularity 3.7 / 5 (3) | comments 3 | with audio podcast

Fire ants assemble as a 'super-organism' (w/ video)

The ants may go marching one by one, but they end up forming a superstructure of thousands -- and together they can form a raft that stretches the boundaries of the laws of physics, according to new research ...

Physics / General Physics

created Apr 25, 2011 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (16) | comments 20 | with audio podcast

Nature and nurture help ant societies run smoothly

Picture an ant colony: up to a million ants, all looking identical, harmoniously going about their busy ant lives. But with so many ants around, how on Earth do they know who's friend and who's foe?

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Apr 22, 2011 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Can bees color maps better than ants?

In mathematics, you need at most only four different colors to produce a map in which no two adjacent regions have the same color. Utah and Arizona are considered adjacent, but Utah and New Mexico, which only share a point, ...

Other Sciences / Mathematics

created Mar 10, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (1) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Studying ants to find out how colony size affects patterns of behavior, energy use

(PhysOrg.com) -- How does size affect the organization and physiology of superorganisms such as bacterial communities, insect colonies or human cities? James Waters and Tate Holbrook, graduate students in ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Jan 26, 2011 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (3) | comments 3 | with audio podcast

Next generation of algorithms inspired by problem-solving ants

(PhysOrg.com) -- An ant colony is the last place you'd expect to find a maths whiz, but University of Sydney researchers have shown that the humble ant is capable of solving difficult mathematical problems.

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Dec 10, 2010 | popularity 3.7 / 5 (27) | comments 11 | with audio podcast

Ants compete, recruit to identify best colony (w/ Video)

(PhysOrg.com) -- Professor Stephen Pratt studies how small ant colonies pick a new nest when theirs is destroyed or is no longer viable, and has found that the "brain" of the colony is distributed throughout ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Nov 04, 2010 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (8) | comments 8 | with audio podcast

Scientists sequence genomes of two ant species for the first time

Scientists have finally sequenced the entire genome of an ant, actually two very different species of ant, and the insights gleaned from their genetic blueprints are already yielding tantalizing clues to the ...

Biology / Biotechnology

created Aug 26, 2010 | popularity 5 / 5 (7) | comments 0 | with audio podcast