History of ants

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Environment • Earth Tech • Information Technology

Eps 21: History of ants

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Taxonomic studies continue to resolve the classification and systematics of ants.
Some modern authors have used the example of the ants to comment on the relationship between society and the individual.
Ants: Standard methods for measuring and monitoring biodiversity .

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Although they are almost ubiquitous today, ants were rare compared to other animals and, according to a recent study, were only found in small numbers in the first half of the twentieth century.
As the flowering plants spread, they became a new source of food for ants, which probably facilitated the insect's movement into new habitats. Scientists estimate that they are the most dominant insect on earth, and there are still thousands of ant species to discover. Ants are invertebrates whose bodies are divided into three pairs of legs in which the head and thorax are attached to the body and in which all vital organs are located.
Humanity has lived in a world largely filled with flowering plants, and ants are particularly remarkable. According to a study [3], the biomass of ants is larger than that of all other insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, fish and birds combined.
As you can see, ants are one of the most diverse insect species in the world and have a long evolutionary history. This means that there can be up to 1.5 billion different ant species. Scientists study the DNA to learn about the differences between ants, how they react to their environment and why different ant species have different behaviours.
But despite their fascinating legacy, ants are one of those pesky pests that most homeowners want to eliminate as quickly as possible.
Ants existed long before the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana, and they had existed for quite a while before. Ants are ancient insects that are more than 100 million years old, but have been at war with other insect species for 2.5 billion years.
The social behaviour of ants and honeybees is the most complex of all insects in the world, and many species differ greatly in their behaviour. Some ant species, such as the slave ants (of which there are many), have a history of enslavement of ants of other species. In Africa, for example, the queen of Bothriomyrmex decapitates the tapinoma ant in order to draw it into her nest.
Then she bites off the Tapinoma Queen's head and begins to lay her own eggs to look after her enslaved Tap-inoma workers.
Social organization means that ant colonies work together for the common goal of colony growth and reproduction. Social organization, i.e. that only one or more individuals can reproduce and lay eggs, means that they can live together in the same colony. They can recruit nests from rich food-sources, hunt and subdue loot together as well as maintain and care for brood among other things.
There are so many advantages to being social, so why have other insects not developed sociality, and why not ants?
According to a new study published in the current issue of the journal Current Biology, ants that look so different are our creepy - crawling cousins. The new findings clearly show that the ants "closest living relatives belong to a superfamily called Apoidea, which also includes bees and lonely hunting wasps. Within the Apa superfamily, there are two subfamilies of huntable ant species, totaling just over 2,000 species, and within the "superfamily" of Apoidesa, there are the two most common ant species in the world, each of which comprises more than 20,000 species described, according to the study.
The Maricopa Harvest ant has the equivalent of 12 honeybees, and the ant family is actually one of the most venomous insects in the world. The study, which used state-of-the-art DNA sequencing techniques to examine the genomes of more than 20,000 ant species, helped settle the ongoing debate over the origins of ants and bees.
The largest ant colony ever recorded is the Argentine ant, which stretches for 3750 miles. The biomass or weight of all ants in the world is equal to the weight of humans in the world.
This species is the first known to have created a supercolony with a population of more than 100,000 ants in a single colony.
Colony - Founding behaviour has greatly diversified ants and underpins their ability to colonise almost any terrestrial habitat. Like social wasps and bees, many ant species have developed queens that can store large amounts of metabolic reserves, and workers that are much smaller than their queens. This adaptation enables the first workers to grow up outdoors on a small footing without food, and this is probably one of the most important adaptations of ants belonging to the subfamily Dolichoderinae, Formicinaa and Myrmicinaes.
In an Independent Colony Foundation (ICF), a lonely queen must raise the first generation of offspring without the help of nests.
The only modern ant queen able to reach the relatively massive size of this ancient beetle belongs to this species. Dorylus wildeemi lives exclusively in tropical regions of Africa, but it is known that the giant ants from the Eocene fossils found in areas of Wyoming and Germany had a tropical climate at that time. Wyoming is home to many plant and animal species that migrated from Africa during the time when the land bridge to the Arctic connected the two continents. Giant Eocene ants flourished in the region between 3.5 and 2.2 million years ago.