Slackers turned saviours
Japanese scientists show that lazy ant workers step in to replace fatigued workers, improving colony long-term persistence.
Japanese scientists show that lazy ant workers step in to replace fatigued workers, improving colony long-term persistence.
Plants & Animals
Mar 13, 2017
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14
Scientists from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) have discovered that the chromosome responsible for the social organisation of colonies of the highly invasive fire ant is likely to have evolved via a single event rather ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 20, 2017
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425
Pest ants like the red imported fire ant could be controlled more effectively with insecticide baits that can withstand moisture, say researchers with the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service ...
Ecology
Feb 20, 2017
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9
Ants found in the Pacific islands of Fiji behave as miniature farmers, carefully sowing and fertilising the seeds of at least six types of plant, a study said Monday.
Plants & Animals
Nov 21, 2016
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73
Having built their nest over the vertical ventilation pipe of an old nuclear weapon bunker in Poland, every year a large number of wood ants fall down the pipe to never return back to their colony.
Plants & Animals
Aug 30, 2016
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Ants are voracious predators and often very good at defending plants from herbivores. People have taken advantage of this quirk for centuries. In fact, using ants in orange groves is one of the first recorded pest control ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 16, 2016
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34
A characteristic of insect societies such as ants is the way tasks are distributed among group members. Not only queens and worker ants have clearly defined responsibilities but the workers themselves also have particular ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 8, 2016
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9
Ants are quite often infected by parasites. For example, tapeworms use ants as intermediate hosts for a part of their development phase before they complete their life cycle in their main host. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 1, 2015
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99
Colonies of ants are incredibly complex, and at the same time intensely cooperative, so much so that they are often referred to as single 'superorganisms'. But to what extent do they actually behave as a single entity?
Plants & Animals
Nov 11, 2015
13
1370
What DaVinci was talking about, though it wasn't called it at the time, was biomimicry. Biomimicry is the practice of using designs from the natural world to solve technological and engineering problems. Were he alive today, ...
Engineering
Oct 29, 2015
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52