Bug Society-Up Close And Personal With Ants

[Feuer Frei!]

Ok, so i like Ants!
Infact, i love 'em... always been fascinated by them.
Amazing creatures:

Their tiny size and existence below our feet means they are often overlooked.
But up close, ants are among the most fascinating – and terrifying – creatures on the Earth.
With this in mind, a team from the California Academy of Sciences are in the middle of the painstaking task of taking highly detailed digital images of every one of the approximately 12,000 known species.
Dr Brian Fisher’s project, Antweb, already has photographs of more than 5,000 species from all over the world in its catalogue.
Among the collection is the trap-jaw, which has the fasts moving mouth in the animal kingdom, and the longhorned crazy ant, which is incapable of walking in a straight line.
Others include the Jerdon's jumping ant. It can leap up to four inches, the equivalent of 225ft in human terms.
To complete the collection Dr Fisher now plans to travel around the world to take magnified images of the pinned ‘type specimens’ in museums.
To produce these magnified images, the team uses software called Auto-Montage 3D, developed by UK-based Scientific Digital Imaging.
This takes and combines 30 different pictures, each along a different plane of focus, revealing details like the giant hairy head of the leaf-cutter.
‘Before this project, this was just a specimen sitting in a museum drawer,’ Dr Fisher adds of the newly photographed species.
Antweb has detailed colour images of every one of the 418 ant species known to inhabit Madagascar, among one of the most diverse environments on Earth due to its isolation.
Dr Fisher says believes his online ant catalogue will serve as a resource for researchers studying the insects.
‘It will be easier for [scientists] to work out if what they have found is a new species if they have access to details of every known species,’ he told the BBC.
‘We’ve only discovered about 15% of all the species on Earth.
‘And people seem more interested in finding life on Mars than the other 85 per cent. I think that’s partly because they aren't able to see this remarkable hidden world.’
The reason that so much is known about ants is partly because they are so numerous. With a population of around 10quadrillion, they are the world’s most successful colonisers.
They live on every continent, except Antarctica and, while some exist only on one hill in Peru, others – like the crazy longhorn – live as far north as Sweden and as far south as New Zealand.

SOURCE WITH GREAT PICTURES HERE

Check the link out, it has some amazing close-ups of different types of ants!

[joea]

Stuff of nightmares-glad no mutant giant ants really exist.

They don't do they?

Very very cool link.

[Oberon]

Give them time Joea.

I too find ants to be very fascinating, the complex hive structure, quite remarkable. To think that they have their own nations made up of super-colonies too...it is amazing.

[Sailor Steve]

That's some pretty awesome stuff! It's amazing the things that exist in the world that we never notice. Thanks for the link.

I do have one quibble with a commonly held myth, though.

Originally Posted by Feuer Frei!

Others include the Jerdon's jumping ant. It can leap up to four inches, the equivalent of 225ft in human terms.

Proportional comparisons make leaping insects look good, but the reason they can leap that far is their tiny size. Strength goes up relative to muscle mass, but weight goes up as a cube. Double the size of the grasshopper and you double his strength, but he now weighs eight times as much (if my math is right, and it probably isn't, but he still weighs a lot more than twice what he did). Look at how far an elephant can jump.

If that ant was the size of a human, he would probably still only be able to jump four inches, if that.

[Jimbuna]

Reminds me of a movie I watched as a kid...'Them'

[AVGWarhawk]

I do recall that movie Jim! Time before CG movies!


Ants...they invade my kitchen every spring.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

I do recall that movie Jim! Time before CG movies!


Ants...they invade my kitchen every spring.

We have the same problem...the wife puts down some ant powder and they never enter the houise...............until next year

The ants around here seem to leave the house alone but out in the fields we have some absolutely MASSIVE ant hills, its downright cool to check them out sometimes. It seems so calm when you first check them out but then you stamp your foot or poke a branch into the hill and it turns into a frenzy within moments.

Have to say I like ants, cool animals.

[Penguin]

For anybody who loves 50's creature films and somehow did not play on the Amiga 20 years ago, there was an awesome game about giant ants, called "It came from the desert". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Came_from_the_Desert
The PC version is available for free from the website of the devs: http://www.cinemaware.com/clsgame_itcame.asp?sel=pcexe

[Dan D]

So how do desert ants find their way home?
Their count their steps!
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/20...nts-that-count

German scientists (Harald Wolf of the University of Ulm and his assistant Matthias Whittlinger) experiment:

3 groups of ants:

a) regular ants
b) ants with lengthened legs by attaching pig hair (ants on stilts)
c) ants with legs cut off

What happens when the ants try to find their way back home from the food source in the dessert (same distance for all groups):
c) do not make it home
b) walk too far
a) make it home

Conclusion: Ants count their steps (the ant pedometer theory)!

The cartoon video on npr science blog explains it all.