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Ants
Temporal range: 100 mya–present.[1] Lower Cretaceous – Present
A group of fire ants.
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Hymenoptera
Superfamily: Formicoidea
Family: Formicidae
Latreille, 1809
Type species
Lasius niger
Linnaeus, 1758
Cladogram of
subfamilies

Martialinae



Leptanillinae



Amblyoponinae



Paraponerinae



Agroecomyrmecinae



Ponerinae



Proceratiinae






Ecitoninae‡



Aenictinae‡




Dorylini‡



Aenictogitoninae‡





Cerapachyinae‡*



Leptanilloidinae‡







Dolichoderinae



Aneuretinae





Pseudomyrmecinae



Myrmeciinae







Ectatomminae



Heteroponerinae




Myrmicinae



Formicinae






A phylogeny of the living ant subfamilies.[2][3]
*Cerapachyinae is paraphyletic
‡ The previous dorylomorph subfamilies were synonymized under Dorylinae by Brady et al. in 2014[4]

An example of symbiosis: the ant protects the aphids and harvests their sugary excretion.

Ants are a kind of insect that lives together in large colonies. They are the family Formicidae.[5][6]

Ants are a lot like bees and wasps. They all originate from the same common ancestor a long time ago, but now have evolved into very different forms, ants being flightless compared to other members of the order Hymenoptera. It is believed that there are about 22,000 different species of ant, but we have only documented approximately 12,500 of them.[7][8][9] Every species of ant has a thin middle segment, known as a thorax, as well as two long rods on their head called antennae.

Ants are social animals, and live in colonies that can range wildly in terms of size. Some species of ants live in small groups, others eat other animals, others still do both. Many ants work together in very large groups to accomplish their tasks. These colonies can have millions of ants in them that travel outside daily over an extremely large area. Ants are small, but they are very strong. Some ants are strong enough to carry things that are as heavy as 10 times their own weight. The most common ant variety is the worker. Workers dig tunnels and carry food back to the colony so that fellow workers and the queen can eat.[10] The Queen is the mother of all the ants in the colony. She is often the only non-worker ant, however, specialty workers such as soldiers or repletes, as well as reproducing ants that are capable of flight known as alates.

Colonies

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The groups that ants live in are called colonies. A colony has a female ant called a queen which lays eggs. Those eggs will grow into more ants. Big colonies of ants have different kinds of ants that grow from the eggs. These are called different castes of ants. Some are workers which do jobs like carrying and digging, and soldiers which fight other animals. Worker and soldier ants are females. Another type of ant are drones which are male ants.[11]

Really big ant colonies are sometimes called superorganisms. This means the ants work together so well that they are like little parts of one big animal. Ants cannot live by themselves for very long because they need to work with other ants.[12][13]

Ants have colonies almost everywhere on planet Earth. Antarctica lacks ants because it's very cold and there's not much food. Small islands may not have ants.

Evolution

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Ants fossilised in Baltic amber

The family Formicidae belongs to the order Hymenoptera, which also includes bees, sawflies and wasps. Ants evolved from a lineage within the vespoid wasps.

Phylogenetic analysis suggests that ants arose in the Lower Cretaceous period about 110 to 130 million years ago, or even earlier. One estimate from DNA studies places the origin of ants at ≈140 million years ago (mya).[14] Another study puts it in the Jurassic at 185 ± 36 mya (95% confidence limits).[15]

After the rise of flowering plants about 100 million years ago ants diversified. They became ecologically dominant about 60 million years ago.[16][17][18]

In 1966 E.O. Wilson and his colleagues identified the fossil remains of an ant (Sphecomyrma freyi) from the Cretaceous period. The specimen, trapped in amber dating back to more than 80 million years ago, has features of both ants and wasps.[19] Sphecomyrma was probably a ground forager but some suggest that primitive ants were likely to have been predators underneath the surface of the soil.

During the Cretaceous period, a few species of primitive ants ranged widely on the Laurasian super-continent (the northern hemisphere). They were scarce in comparison to other insects, representing about 1% of the insect population.

Ants became dominant after adaptive radiation at the beginning of the Cainozoic. By the Oligocene and Miocene ants had come to represent 20-40% of all insects found in major fossil deposits. Of the species that lived in the Eocene epoch, approximately one in ten genera survive to the present. Genera surviving today comprise 56% of the genera in Baltic amber fossils (early Oligocene), and 92% of the genera in Dominican amber fossils (apparently early Miocene).[16][20]p23

Termites, though sometimes called white ants, are not ants and belong to the order Isoptera. Termites are actually more closely related to cockroaches and mantids. Termites are eusocial but differ greatly in the genetics of reproduction. The similar social structure is attributed to convergent evolution.[21] Velvet ants look like large ants, but are wingless female wasps.[22][23]

Development and reproduction

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Meat eater ant nest during swarming.

The life of an ant starts from an egg. If the egg is fertilised, the progeny will be female (diploid); if not, it will be male (haploid). Ants develop by complete metamorphosis with the larval stages passing through a pupal stage before emerging as an adult. The larva is fed and cared for by workers.

Food is given to the larvae by trophallaxis, a process in which an ant regurgitates liquid food held in its crop. This is also how adults share food, stored in the 'social stomach', among themselves.

Larvae may also be given solid food brought back by foraging workers, and may even be taken to captured prey in some species. The larvae grow through a series of moults and enter the pupal stage.[24]

The differentiation into queens and workers (which are both female), and different castes of workers, is influenced in some species by the food the larvae get. Genetic influences, and the control of gene expression by the feeding are complex. The determination of caste is a major subject of research.[20]p351, 372[25]

A new worker spends the first few days of its adult life caring for the queen and young. It then does digging and other nest work, and later, defends the nest and forages. These changes are sometimes fairly sudden, and define what are called temporal castes. An explanation for the sequence is suggested by the high casualties involved in foraging, making it an acceptable risk only for ants that are older and are likely to die soon of natural causes.[26][27]

Mating

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Most ant species have a system in which only the queen and breeding females can mate. Contrary to popular belief, some ant nests have multiple queens (polygyny). The life history of Harpegnathos saltator is exceptional among ants because both queens and some workers reproduce sexually.[28]

The winged male ants, called drones, emerge from pupae with the breeding females (although some species, like army ants, have wingless queens), and do nothing in life except eat and mate.

The nuptial flight

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Most ants produce a new generation each year.[29] During the species specific breeding period, new reproductives, winged males and females leave the colony in what is called a nuptial flight. Typically, the males take flight before the females. Males then use visual cues to find a common mating ground, for example, a landmark such as a pine tree to which other males in the area converge. Males secrete a mating pheromone that females follow. Females of some species mate with just one male, but in some others they may mate with anywhere from one to ten or more different males.[20] Mated females then seek a suitable place to begin a colony. There, they break off their wings and begin to lay and care for eggs. The females store the sperm they obtain during their nuptial flight to selectively fertilise future eggs.

The first workers to hatch are weak and smaller than later workers, but they begin to serve the colony immediately. They enlarge the nest, forage for food and care for the other eggs. This is how new colonies start in most species. Species that have multiple queens may have a queen leaving the nest along with some workers to found a colony at a new site,[20]p143 a process akin to swarming in honeybees.

Ants mating.

A wide range of reproductive strategies have been noted in ant species. Females of many species are known to be capable of reproducing asexually through parthenogenesis,[30] and one species, Mycocepurus smithii is known to be all-female.[31]

Ant colonies can be long-lived. The queens can live for up to 30 years, and workers live from 1 to 3 years. Males, however, are more transitory, and survive only a few weeks.[32] Ant queens are estimated to live 100 times longer than solitary insects of a similar size.[33]

Ants are active all year long in the tropics but, in cooler regions, survive the winter in a state of dormancy or inactivity. The forms of inactivity are varied and some temperate species have larvae going into the inactive state (diapause), while in others, the adults alone pass the winter in a state of reduced activity.[34]

Uses

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It may seem strange that ants have uses, but there are some. Some people use ants for food, medicine and rituals. Some species of ants are used for pest control (they eat pests that destroy food for humans). They can damage crops and enter buildings, though. Some species, like the red imported fire ant, live in places where they came to by complete accident.

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Notes

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  1. ↑ Moreau CS, Bell CD, Vila R, Archibald SB, Pierce NE (April 2006). "Phylogeny of the ants: diversification in the age of angiosperms". Science. 312 (5770): 101–4. Bibcode:2006Sci...312..101M. doi:10.1126/science.1124891. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 16601190. S2CID 20729380.
  2. ↑ Ward, Philip S (2007). "Phylogeny, classification, and species-level taxonomy of ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)" (PDF). Zootaxa. 1668: 549–563. doi:10.11646/zootaxa.1668.1.26.
  3. ↑ Rabeling C, Brown JM, Verhaagh M (2008). "Newly discovered sister lineage sheds light on early ant evolution". PNAS. 105 (39): 14913–7. Bibcode:2008PNAS..10514913R. doi:10.1073/pnas.0806187105. PMC 2567467. PMID 18794530.
  4. ↑ Brady, Seán G; Fisher, Brian L; Schultz, Ted R; Ward, Philip S (2014). "The rise of army ants and their relatives: diversification of specialized predatory doryline ants". BMC Evolutionary Biology. 14: 2–14. doi:10.1186/1471-2148-14-93. PMC 4021219. PMID 24886136.
  5. ↑ pronounced /fɔrˈmɪsɨdiː/). The word ant comes from ante, a Middle English which comes from æmette of Old English and is related to the Old High German āmeiza. All of these words come from West Germanic *amaitjo. It meant "the biter" (from *ai-, "off, away" and *mait- "cut"). ""ant". Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary". Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 6 June 2008.
  6. ↑ "Ant. Online Etymology Dictionary". Retrieved 30 May 2009. The family name Formicidae is from the Latin word formīca ("ant"). Simpson DP (1979). Cassell's Latin Dictionary (5 ed.). London: Cassell Ltd. ISBN 978-0-304-52257-6. The word "ant" in other languages such as the Portuguese formiga, Italian formica, Spanish hormiga, Romanian furnică and French fourmi come from the Latin word.
  7. ↑ Bolton, Barry (1995). A new General Catalogue of the Ants of the World. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-61514-4.
  8. ↑ "Hymenoptera name server. Formicidae species count". Ohio State University. Archived from the original on 2008-06-18. Retrieved 2010-12-06.
  9. ↑ La nueva taxonomía de hormigas. Pages 45-48 in Fernández, F. Introducción a las hormigas de la región neotropical (PDF). Instituto Humboldt, Bogotá. 2003. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authors= ignored (help)
  10. ↑ Wade, Nicholas (15 July 2008). "Taking a cue from ants on evolution of humans". New York Times. Retrieved 15 July 2008.
  11. ↑ Oster, George F.; Wilson, Edward O. (1978). Caste and ecology in the social insects. Vol. 12. Princeton University Press, Princeton. pp. 21–22. ISBN 978-0-691-02361-8. PMID 740003. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
  12. ↑ Oster, George F.; Wilson, Edward O. (1978). Caste and ecology in the social insects. Vol. 12. Princeton University Press, Princeton. pp. 21–22. ISBN 978-0-691-02361-8. PMID 740003. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
  13. ↑ Flannery, Tim (2011). A Natural History of the Planet. Grove/Atlantic, Inc. p. 79. ISBN 978-0-8021-9560-9.
  14. ↑ Brady S.G. 2003. Evolution of the army ant syndrome: the origin and long-term evolutionary stasis of a complex of behavioral and reproductive adaptations. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 100, 6575–6579.Evolution of the army ant syndrome: The origin and long-term evolutionary stasis of a complex of behavioral and reproductive adaptations | PNAS
  15. ↑ Crozier R.H, Jermiin L.S. & Chiotis M. 1997. Molecular evidence for a Jurassic origin of ants. Naturwissenschaften 84, 22–23.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Grimaldi D, Agosti D (2001). "A formicine in New Jersey Cretaceous amber (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) and early evolution of the ants". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 97 (25): 13678–13683. doi:10.1073/pnas.240452097. PMC 17635. PMID 11078527.
  17. ↑ Moreau CS; et al. (2006). "Phylogeny of the ants: diversification in the Age of Angiosperms". Science. 312 (5770): 101–104. Bibcode:2006Sci...312..101M. doi:10.1126/science.1124891. PMID 16601190. S2CID 20729380.
  18. ↑ Wilson E.O, Hölldobler B (2005). "The rise of the ants: A phylogenetic and ecological explanation". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 102 (21): 7411–7414. Bibcode:2005PNAS..102.7411W. doi:10.1073/pnas.0502264102. PMC 1140440. PMID 15899976.
  19. ↑ Wilson E.O., Carpenter FM, Brown WL (1967). "The first Mesozoic ants". Science. 157 (3792): 1038–1040. Bibcode:1967Sci...157.1038W. doi:10.1126/science.157.3792.1038. PMID 17770424. S2CID 43155424.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 20.3 Holldobler, Bert; Wilson, Edward O. (1998). The Ants. Springer. ISBN 978-3-540-52092-4.
  21. ↑ Thorne, Barbara L (1997). "Evolution of eusociality in termites" (PDF). Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 28 (5): 27–53. doi:10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.28.1.27. PMC 349550. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-05-30. Retrieved 2010-12-07.
  22. ↑ "Order Isoptera - Termites". Iowa State University Entomology. 2004. Retrieved 12 June 2008.
  23. ↑ "Family Mutillidae - Velvet ants". Iowa State University Entomology. 2004. Retrieved 12 June 2008.
  24. ↑ Gillott, Cedric (1995). Entomology. Springer. p. 325. ISBN 978-0-306-44967-3.
  25. ↑ Anderson, Kirk E.; Linksvayer, Timothy A.; Smith, Chris R. (2008). "The causes and consequences of genetic caste determination in ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)" (PDF). Myrmecol. News. 11: 119–132. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-27. Retrieved 2010-12-07.
  26. ↑ Traniello JFA (1989). "Foraging strategies of ants". Annual Review of Entomology. 34: 191–210. doi:10.1146/annurev.en.34.010189.001203.
  27. ↑ Sorensen A, Busch TM, Vinson SB (1984). "Behavioral flexibility of temporal sub-castes in the fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, in response to food". Psyche. 91 (3–4): 319–332. doi:10.1155/1984/39236.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  28. ↑ Peeters C, Holldobler B (1995). "Reproductive cooperation between queens and their mated workers: The complex life history of an ant with a valuable nest" (PDF). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 92 (24): 10977–10979. Bibcode:1995PNAS...9210977P. doi:10.1073/pnas.92.24.10977. PMC 40553. PMID 11607589.
  29. ↑ Taylor, Richard W. (2007). "Bloody funny wasps! Speculations on the evolution of eusociality in ants". In Snelling R.R., B.L. Fisher, & P S. Ward (ed.). Advances in ant systematics (Hymenoptera: Formicidae): homage to E.O. Wilson – 50 years of contributions. Memoirs of the American Entomological Institute, 80. American Entomological Institute. pp. 580–609.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  30. ↑ Heinze, Jurgen; Tsuji, Kazuki (1995). "Ant reproductive strategies" (PDF). Res. Popul. Ecol. 37 (2): 135–149. doi:10.1007/BF02515814. S2CID 21948488. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-05-27. Retrieved 2010-12-07.
  31. ↑ Himler, Anna G.; Caldera, EJ; Baer, BC; Fernández-Marín, H; Mueller, UG (2009). "No sex in fungus-farming ants or their crops". Proc. R. Soc. B. 276 (1667): 2611–2616. doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.0313. PMC 2686657. PMID 19369264.
  32. ↑ Keller L (1998). "Queen lifespan and colony characteristics in ants and termites". Insectes Sociaux. 45 (3): 235–246. doi:10.1007/s000400050084. S2CID 24541087.
  33. ↑ Resh, Vincent H.; Carde, Ring T. (2003). Encyclopedia of Insects. San Diego: Academic Press. pp. 29–32. ISBN 978-0-12-586990-4.
  34. ↑ Kipyatkov V.E (2001). "Seasonal life cycles and the forms of dormancy in ants (Hymenoptera, Formicoidea)". Acta Societatis Zoologicae Bohemicae. 65 (2): 198–217.

Further reading

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Other websites

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Wikispecies has information on: ants.
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