RI, MA EHS Pest Control Blog

Did you know that there are more than 12,000 species of ants all over the world! Here's some more fascinating facts about ants.

• An ant can lift 20 times its own body weight. If a second grader was as strong as an ant, she would be able to pick up a car!
• Some queen ants can live for many years and have millions of babies!
• Ants don’t have ears. Ants "hear" by feeling vibrations in the ground through their feet.
• When ants fight, it is usually to the death!
• When foraging, ants leave a pheromone trail so that they know where they’ve been.
• Queen ants have wings, which they shed when they start a new nest.
• Ants don’t have lungs. Oxygen enters through tiny holes all over the body and carbon dioxide leaves through the same holes.
• When the queen of the colony dies, the colony can only survive a few months. Queens are rarely replaced and the workers are not able to reproduce.

George Williams
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA

Ants: Clues to Human Development

DNA of Harvester ants studied for queens vs. workers

The fate of most ant larvae - that is, whether an individual insect grows up to be a worker or a queen - depends largely on the quality and the amount of food they receive from the other ants in the colony. But in a few rare species, an ant’s future social “caste’’ rests solely within its genes. “Workers just work; they don’t produce offspring. Only the queen reproduces,’’ said Juergen Gadau, associate professor of biology in Arizona State University’s school of life sciences. “From an evolutionary standpoint, it is hard to understand how something can evolve that foregoes reproduction. At the core of their ‘society’ is the division of reproductive and non-reproductive individuals.’’

Gadau is studying these rare ant populations, focusing on Harvester ants, with the goal of identifying the individual genes responsible for producing either queens or workers. Ultimately, he hopes to use his findings to reveal which of those genes also are involved in the case of the other ants - those largely influenced by food - and how, for example, the differences in food are involved in turning on the worker or queen genes.

“We want to first understand the genetics, then see if the food issue prompts the same gene expression in the other ant population,’’ Gadau said. “Once I have the gene, then I can go back and see how it is involved in the regulatory network, and test whether the introduction of food changes the regulation of the genome in the same way.’’

Source = US News.com

George Williams,
General Manager - Staff Entomologist

Pest Control, RI, Pest Control, MA