Have you seen ants this year? In England, the ant is possibly the black garden ant, referred to as Lasius niger – the most typical ant in Europe. It is one of in between 12,000 as well as 20,000 types of ants, they are the scourge of gardeners – but additionally an intriguing varieties.

Little, black, wingless employee ants run around the walkways, crawl on your plants, care for aphids, or gather tasty crumbs from your cooking area. Whereas the flying ants that periodically show up on cozy summer season evenings are in fact siblings of these winged workers. Not only that, right here are other fascinating things about ants:

1. Most of the ants you see are female

Ants have a caste system. There is a department of responsibility between them. The queen is the creator of the colony, and her duty is to lay eggs. Employee ants are all female, and also they are in charge of the harmonious work of the nest.

Their duties ranged from taking care of the queen and also the young, foraging for food, managing dispute in the nest, as well as removing excrement. Employee ants will likely never have spawn of their own. Most of the eggs develop as employees, once the nest is ready, the queen generates the following reproductive generation which will certainly proceed her life to start her very own nest.

The destiny of a women ant to come to be an employee or queen is primarily established based on diet, not genes. The larvae of any kind of female ant can come to be queens, that is, those that obtain a protein-rich diet regimen. Other larvae receive less protein, which triggers them to create as employees.

2. Male ants are winged reproductive representatives just

Male ants have a mother however no daddy. Author supplied
Unlike humans, with X and Y chromosomes, the sex of an ant is determined by the number of copies of the genome it has.

Male ants create from unfertilized eggs and therefore do not get the genome from the father. This means that male ants have no papa and can not have boys, however they do have grandfathers as well as can have grand sons. Women ants, comparative, establish from fertilized eggs as well as have 2 duplicates of the genome – one from their daddy as well as one from their mom.

Male ants function like sperm with wings. Just having one genome duplicate implies each of their sperm is genetically the same to themselves. And their job was done rapidly; they pass away after mating, although their sperm survives on, possibly for many years – their task is basically just for recreation.

3. After the queen hasn’t eaten for weeks

When conditions are warm and also moist, winged virgins as well as males leave their nests trying to find mates. This is the actions seen on “flying ants day”. In L. niger types, breeding takes place while flying, frequently thousands of meters above the ground and thus calls for good weather condition. After that, the queens was up to the ground as well as eliminated their wings, while the males soon died. The mated queen after that chooses a site for the nest and also goes into the soft ground due to the current rainfalls.

When underground, the queens will certainly not eat for weeks – up until they have actually produced their very own little girl labor. They use the power from their fat down payments as well as excess flight muscular tissues to lay eggs, which have been fertilized by the sperm from their mating precede. It coincides stock of sperm acquired from a long-dead man that enables a queen to remain to have fed eggs throughout her life. The queen never ever remarried.

4. Making roadway ants: collaboration, fatality, and also slavery

Sometimes 2 L. niger queens integrated to locate a nest. This initially participating organization – which increased the possibilities of developing a colony – dissolved as the new adult employees showed up and afterwards the queens combated to the death. Worse, L. niger colonies occasionally swipe brood from their next-door neighbors, placing them to function as servants.

Enslavement has established in a variety of ant species, although they also reveal teamwork at a phenomenal level. A severe example is the Argentine ant “supercolony” (Linepithema humile), which crosses 6,000 kilometers of European coastline, from Italy to northwest Spain, as well as is composed of billions of employees from millions of cooperating nests.

5. Queen ants can live for decades, males for a week

After constructing her nest, the queen’s work is not finished and she still has several years in advance to lay eggs. In the laboratory, L. niger queens have lived for nearly 30 years.