News tagged with ant species
New parasitic fungi found that turn ants into zombies
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists from the US and UK have discovered four new species of parasitic fungi in the Brazilian rainforests. The fungi attack four distinct species of ants and release mind-altering chemicals ...
Mar 04, 2011 |
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Supersoldier ants created in the lab by reactivating ancestral genes
(PhysOrg.com) -- There are over 1100 species of Pheidole genus ants, and most individual ants belong to either the worker or soldier caste. In only eight of the Pheidole species, some individuals can belong ...
Jan 06, 2012 |
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'Bigfoot of ants' found (again)
(PhysOrg.com) -- Stop the presses: Bigfoot was spotted in Cary! It's probably not the Bigfoot you know, that 8-foot-tall beast also known as Sasquatch. Instead, it's the Bigfoot of ants, a species of ant so ...
Oct 14, 2010 |
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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 ...
Aug 26, 2010 |
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Food security for leaf-cutting ants: Workers and their fungus garden reject endophyte invaders (w/Video)
New diseases directly affect human survival and food security, especially as population density climbs. Leaf-cutting ants, one of a few groups of social insects to cultivate crops, have harvested plant material ...
Apr 02, 2009 |
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Entomologists name 'diving beetle' for Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert
"What has six legs and is way cooler than a spider?" asks a riddle on the cover of a birthday card sent to Stephen Colbert by entomologists Quentin Wheeler at Arizona State University and Kelly Miller at the ...
May 06, 2009 |
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Aussie meat ants may be invasive cane toad's Achilles' heel
Ecologists in Australia have discovered that cane toads are far more susceptible to being killed and eaten by meat ants than native frogs. Their research - published in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ec ...
Mar 30, 2009 |
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When ants attack: Researchers recreate chemicals that trigger aggression
(PhysOrg.com) -- Experiments led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have demonstrated that normally friendly ants can turn against each other by exploiting the chemical cues they use ...
Oct 27, 2009 |
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The Joy of sets: For ants and trees, multiple partners are a boon
In the complex world of ant-plant partnerships, serial monogamy can help trees maximize their evolutionary fitness, a new University of Florida study shows.
Sep 21, 2010 |
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Native Lizards Evolve to Escape Attacks by Fire Ants
(PhysOrg.com) -- Penn State Assistant Professor of Biology Tracy Langkilde has shown that native fence lizards in the southeastern United States are adapting to potentially fatal invasive fire-ant attacks ...
Biology /
Jan 20, 2009 |
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New research shows ants able to discern difference between threat levels
(PhysOrg.com) -- In an interesting study designed to determine how well ants are able to gauge a threat, Inon Scharf and his colleagues at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, have shown that even ...
Jul 05, 2011 |
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Common house ants form supercolonies, prosper in urban settings
One of the most common house ant species might have been built for living in some of the smallest spaces in a forest, but the ants have found ways to take advantage of the comforts of city living.
Mar 30, 2010 |
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How ants tame the wilderness: Rainforest species use chemicals to identify which plants to prune
Survival in the depths of the tropical rainforest not only depends on a species' ability to defend itself, but can be reliant on the type of cooperation researchers discovered between ants and tropical trees. ...
May 12, 2011 |
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Death from above: Parasite wasps attacking ants from the air filmed for the first time
Flight attacks of small parasitoid wasps (no larger than 2.0 mm in size) on ant workers have been filmed by José María Gómez Durán from Madrid. The four species of wasps show amazing adaptations ...
Aug 29, 2011 |
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When industrious ants go too far
Nature is full of mutually beneficial arrangements between organisms—like the relationship between flowering plants and their bee pollinators. But sometimes these blissful relationships have a dark side, as Harvard biologist ...
Apr 28, 2009 |
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