A(i)n’t they amazing
- POSTED ON: 6 Jul, 2022
- TOTAL VIEWS: 174 Views
- POSTED BY: Young World | Kate Bagli | Article by Nimi Kurian
- ARTICLE POINTS: 150 Points
The next time you take a walk, look down. You may come across an orderly line of foraging ants carrying seeds. Follow this trail and you will come to their home–a beautiful rosette-shaped fort of mud. These ants are the Harvesters.
The rosette is a maze-like entry into the nest. The actual home has several chambers deep inside the ground.
The harvester ants pass the seeds on to another group that tears off the husks from the seeds. After drying the seeds, worker ants cover them with a germicidal chemical from their glands. This turns the seeds into a crumbly mass and ensures that they do not germinate or get infected by microbes once they are carried into the deepest underground chamber of their home, the granary. The granary may be as much as six feet deep. The mass of treated and softened seeds, rich in proteins and fats, forms the staple for the colony.
The ant world also has cultivators. These are the leaf-cutter ants that cultivate fungal gardens. Using their toothed mandibles, they bite off pieces of leaves from trees, often stripping them bare. After cleaning the leaf pieces, they chew and mix them with their saliva and deliberately infect them with a special kind of fungus. Sentry ants are posted to guard the precious fungus. The sentries use their extra sharp mandibles to simply slice off marauding ant thieves who
attempt to sneak into their fungus garden.
Certain species of ants protect plant pests such as aphids. They lead the aphids to the tenderest leaves with abundant sap. What do the ants get in return? When they tap the aphids’ rear end with their antennae, the latter secret a sweet honeydew, which the ants happily lap up.
We have a lot to learn from this social behaviour of ants. How each ant, in a colony of hundreds, works for the community as a whole. There is much selflessness, caring and nurturing in every colony. Neglecting duties is an absolute taboo.