Okay so this guy on YouTube that goes by Ants Canada has golden crazy ants in a big terrarium and he added pitcher plants in the hopes that it would help to naturally cull some of the ants except the ants fucking started feeding the pitcher plants the leftover cockroach parts so they could get hopped up on the juice the pitcher plants secrete.
My fucking mind is blown! They just figured this out naturally within two days of the pitcher plants being introduced.
I saw this from a distance and wasn’t sure what I was looking at until I got close
That is waaaaay too many winged ants.
I know a spot near the river where, as soon as an ant nest swarms and sends up the winged ants, a tornado of dragonflies converges on them and eats them all. You can grab twigs and stuff covered in ants and make a flicking motion to throw the ants and the dragonflies eat them before they touch the ground. Fun way to help keep invasive ants from spreading any further.
Substances don’t have to be a liquid or a gas to behave like a fluid. Swarms of fire ants display viscoelastic properties, meaning they can act like both a liquid and a solid. Like a spring, a ball of fire ants is elastic, bouncing back after being squished (top image). But the group can also act like a viscous liquid. A ball of ants can flow and diffuse outward (middle image). The ants are excellent at linking with one another, which allows them to survive floods by forming rafts and to escape containers by building towers.
Researchers found the key characteristic is that ants will only maintain links with nearby ants as long as they themselves experience no more than 3 times their own weight in load. In practice, the ants can easily withstand 100 times that load without injury, but that lower threshold describes the transition point between ants as a solid and ants as a fluid. If an ant in a structure is loaded with more force, he’ll let go of his neighbors and start moving around.
When they’re linked, the fire ants are close enough together to be water-repellent. Even if an ant raft gets submerged (bottom image), the space between ants is small enough that water can’t get in and the air around them can’t get out. This coats the submerged ants in their own little bubble, which the ants use to breathe while they float out a flood. For more, check out the video below and the full (fun and readable!) research paper linked in the credits. (Video and image credits: Vox/Georgia Tech; research credit: S. Phonekeo et al., pdf; submitted by Joyce S., Rebecca S., and possibly others)
(okay so this explanation is gonna have a lot of pics so im gonna put it under a cut even though i super dont want to because this is so cool like im gonna die) EDIT: i’ve been told that the read more sucks so im removing it
yes, those are fangs. they don’t function like actual fangs- keep in mind that nepenthes pitchers are inert, and don’t close or move like sundews or venus fly traps do. in this case, the fangs profusely secrete nectar (other functional uses of them are debated, but include warding off monkeys that might try to drink from them and creating loose footing for insects):
this is pretty much the main appeal of bicals to growers and hobbyists, but scientifically, they’re an amazing case of mutualism! the pictures we’ve seen so far are what we call the lower pitchers of the plant. nepenthes have upper and lower pitchers that grow on those respective portions of the vine; these pitchers sometimes have physiological differences. what we’re gonna focus on here is the upper pitchers, which look like this:
its a built-in house for a very specific species of carpenter ants, Camponotus schmitzi, which live almost exclusively in wild bicals and are heavily dependent on them in their native habitat of Borneo.
both of these species are so specifically evolved to each other that its ridiculous. the ants:
-get to eat all the nectar they want because they’re specially evolved to be able to crawl all over it
-get to eat flies, mites, fungus, other ants, other insects, and anything else that might fall into the pitcher, or just attack them so they can’t escape.
-can walk on and be submerged in the fluid inside the pitcher without getting eaten alive by acid because they’re evolved to
-get a free house with every upper pitcher the plant makes. the plant doesnt have special lower pitchers for them because they sometimes get flooded when it rains (closer to the ground) and the plant doesnt want to hurt its ant friends
-basically sit right under the lip of the pitcher and wait to ambush things that fall in
-the ants have this behavior where they drag big prey they want up from the fluid up the pitcher to eat it under the pitcher lip. this is just how they eat. what do u expect like they’re not gonna eat right in the pitcher fluid like animals even if dragging food up two inches can take them up to twelve hours at a time depending on the size like were u raised in a barn?????????
the plant:
-gets free protection from mites and fungus and stuff
-doesnt need many digestive fluids of its own because the ants just eat whatever falls in and then poop it into the pitcher, which is way easier to digest
-gets its pitchers kept clean and the fluid free from clutter that might cause rot
-sometimes gets to eat dead ants that happen to fall into the pitcher
-research also tells us that the ants tend to prefer attacking large prey and stuff that tries harder to escape, increasing the amount the plant gets to eat.
in general, bicals can survive without the ants and do fine in captivity, but the ants cannot survive without the plants- they nest in their upper pitchers exclusively and get a ton, if not all, of their food from them. in general, this relationship is suuuuuper complex and is actually still being studied!
some more sweet plant and ant friend pics from this research paper on their friendship:
here’s a video showing the ants going about some of their daily business!
Eciton burchellii is a species of New World army ant in the genus Eciton. This species, one of the most extensively studied ant species, consists of expansive, organized swarm raids that give it the informal name, Eciton army ant. This species displays polymorphic caste features, with the soldier ants having much larger heads and mandibles. In terms of geographical distribution, this species is found in the Amazon jungle and Central America.
Photo credits:João P. Burini ,Mark W. Moffett/Minden Pictures, Francesco Tomasinelli / Natural Visions
I would think the knowledge that these sorts of creatures exist would help explain to humans just why Scraplets are so utterly horrifying despite their miniscule size.
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