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Farmer Ants Fertilize Their Gardens With Bacteria
Thanks to their vast underground fungus farms, leafcutter ants are one of Earth’s most successful species — and one secret of their agricultural success is bacteria, which the ants use like fertilizer....
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95-Million-Year-Old Bugs Found in African Amber Surprise Scientists
Newly discovered pieces of amber have given scientists a peek into the Africa of 95 million years ago, when flowering plants blossomed across Earth and the animal world scrambled to adapt. Suspended in...
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Lost Tribes Used Clever Tricks to Turn Amazon Wasteland to Farms
A vast series of earth mounds on the eastern coast of South America may be living landscape fossils of a forgotten civilization’s agriculture. People raised the mounds between 1,000 and 700 years ago...
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Ants Use Their Own Velcro to Catch Supersized Prey
Long before Velcro was invented, a species of South American ant used its own natural form of the wonder material to hunt. The claws of Azteca andreae are shaped like hooks and fit neatly into fibrous...
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Native Toad Fights Back Against Yellow Crazy-Ant Invasion
After so many sad tales of invasive species overwhelming hapless natives, scientists have found a native toad in Indonesia that’s fighting back. The common Sulawesi toad turns out to be a prodigious...
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50-Million-Year-Old Insect Trove Found in Indian Amber
A collection of amber deposits unearthed in northwest India has opened a spectacular window into insect life some 50 million years ago. At that time, what’s now the Asian subcontinent had just crashed...
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Clones of Crazy Ant Queens Fuel Global Invasion
The worldwide invasion of Longhorn crazy ants appears to rely on a reproductive trick that allows for incest without the problems of inbreeding. In the early stages of invasion, the average ant queen...
View Article4 New Species of Zombifying Ant Fungus Found
All images: David Hughes, Pennsylvania State University See Also: Funky Worms Cause Ants to Mimic Fruit Clones of Crazy Ant Queens Fuel Global Invasion Mosquito-Attacking Fungus Engineered to Block...
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Ant Rafts Repel Water Like Gore-Tex
In the first serious study of the physics of fire-ant rafts, researchers have described how the insects form floating, waterproof islands. In nature, the rafts allow fire ants to...
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Hummingbird-Sized Ants Once Roamed Wyoming
It’s not a bird or a plane, but it is an ant the size of a hummingbird. A winged ant queen fossilized in 49.5-million-year-old Wyoming rock ranks as the first body of a giant ant from the Western...
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Scientists Want You to Track Ants in Your Neighborhood
Ants seem common and ubiquitous, especially at summertime picnics. But the names and types of ants crawling around city parks and streets are largely unknown to researchers. The School of Ants project...
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Pioneering Ants Challenge Self-Organization Assumptions
Some worker ants are more equal than others. As with other social insects, it was once thought that workers were essentially equivalent in ant colony hierarchies. But it appears that a few...
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Air Attack: Parasitic Wasps Lay Eggs in Ants
Parasitic wasps dive-bomb ants, injecting their eggs into ant bodies. Soon the ant dies, its body converted into an egg-producing factory.
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Spiders Coat Webs With Toxic Chemicals for Self-Defense
A tasty spider and its bundle of prey might make an excellent treat for a bunch of marauding ants. So to protect their homes, and themselves, Golden Orb Spiders (Nephila antipodiana) use chemical warfare.
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What Ant Colonies Can Teach Humans
Insect behavior mimicking human networks is actually not what’s most interesting about ant networks. What’s far more interesting are the parallels in the other direction: What have the ants worked out...
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