Ants scavenge on tiny organisms and prey on insects larger than them – this behavior helps create an ecological balance. Additionally, ants are the foundation of the food pyramid. If ants went extinct, the food chain would collapse, and it would affect every organism.
The disappearance of ants from the earth would affect all living creatures, including humans, animals, and plants. Ant-eating mammals that exclusively feed on ants would go extinct. Ants extinction would adversely affect soil health and fertility.
Ants act as decomposers by feeding on organic waste, insects or other dead animals. They help keep the environment clean. Carpenter ants, which make their nests in dead or diseased wood, considerably accelerate the decomposition process of timber.
Ants don't have complex emotions such as love, anger, or empathy, but they do approach things they find pleasant and avoid the unpleasant. They can smell with their antennae, and so follow trails, find food and recognise their own colony.
As far as entomologists are concerned, insects do not have pain receptors the way vertebrates do. They don't feel 'pain,' but may feel irritation and probably can sense if they are damaged. Even so, they certainly cannot suffer because they don't have emotions.
In the insect world, it's usually butterflies that are associated with social behavior, but according to a new study it's ants that really can't live without their peers … literally. Discovery News reports that ants died after just 6 days of isolation, whereas the socially integrated controls lived for up to 66 days.
Or, at least, they were farming long before humans were. A new study led by the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Copenhagen found that a species of ants in South America known as attine were cultivating fungi 55 to 60 million years ago, just after the age of the dinosaurs.
Ants scavenge on tiny organisms and prey on insects larger than them – this behavior helps create an ecological balance. Additionally, ants are the foundation of the food pyramid. If ants went extinct, the food chain would collapse, and it would affect every organism.
Do Ants Know If Other Ants Die? When an ant dies, the others do not notice straight away. They will just walk around it as if it was not there, but after three days, the ants will notice. After three days, the corpse will start decaying and it is at this point that it releases oleic acid.
To the naked eye, ants deal with their dead much like humans. When a member of the colony dies, the carcass will lie where it fell for a period of roughly two days. In the fashion of a wake, this time period presumably gives the other ants time to pay their respects to their fallen comrade.
It would take several hundred ants to pick up each pound of the person. So you'd need to know the person's weight and then multiply that by 200 to 300 ants.
God made so many ants because ants are important housekeepers for the earth.
The oldest insect ever found is the fossilised Rhyniognatha hirsti, which lived in what is now Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, approximately 410 million years ago - that is 30 million years older than any other known insect fossil!
Ants are similar to many other insects in that they possess senses such as hearing, touch and smell. Although hearing is very different in ants than animals that typically have ears, ants do possess the capability to hear.
In fact, there's mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of feelings. They can be literally buzzing with delight at pleasant surprises, or sink into depression when bad things happen that are out of their control.
Ants become the pallbearer
After a few days the dead ant is carried off and placed on the “ant graveyard” by the other dead ants. This may seem like ants have complex feelings and need a few days to grieve before they dispose of the body, but in reality it's far more chemical than that.
Many people think they can get rid of ants by drowning them or suffocating them. These methods for getting rid of ants are simply not effective because ants do not have lungs.
Spiders were among the earliest animals to live on land, probably evolving about 400 million years ago. Spiders probably evolved about 400 million years ago from thick-waisted arachnid ancestors that were not long emerged from life in water.
Researchers believe the record for shortest adult life span belongs to the female mayfly called Dolania americana. After spending a year or more living on the bottom of a stream in its aquatic nymph form, it emerges as a flying adult — and lives for less than five minutes.
Cockroaches are Really Old. It is believed that cockroaches originated more than 280 million years ago in the Carboniferous era.
Every summer, blood-red ants of the species Formica sanguinea go on a mission to capture slaves. They infiltrate the nest of another ant species, like the peaceful F. fusca, assassinate the queen, and kidnap the pupae to raise as the next generation of slaves.
Ants, or other insects, cannot make their way into a living human brain via the ears, nor would it be possible for them to actually stay alive in the brain even if they could. The aural system and the brain itself has a number of defence mechanisms and physical properties that make such an invasion impossible.
Why do ants want these alien creatures to live in their nests? For several reasons: some give off smell pleasant to the ants' senses; others give sweet juices; and some are just pets or playthings like cats and dogs to human beings.
A recent study of ants' sleep cycle found that the average worker ant takes approximately 250 naps each day, with each one lasting just over a minute. That adds up to 4 hours and 48 minutes of sleep per day. The research also found that 80 percent of the ant workforce was awake and active at any one time.