Latest Weaver ant Stories

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A single ant colony can have thousands of ants, all scurrying around performing various tasks, maintaining their territory for the queen. And because they all look alike, studying them individually by eye can prove extremely difficult, if not impossible. To bypass this obstacle, Danielle Mersch and colleagues from the University of Lausanne tagged every single worker in entire ant colonies and tracked them by computer. The...

Researchers from the University of Melbourne report they have found that ant colonies share a collective memory for the odor of ants in rival nests. According to the new research, the ants use the information to identify the rival ants and compete, similar to how sports fans know each other by wearing their teams' colors. Study leader Professor Mark Elgar from the University's Department of Zoology said the ant colony's collective memory helps give an edge in a competitive world by...

Ant colonies with more behavioral variety are more successful / New findings in ant behavioral research They attack other colonies, plunder and rob, kill other colonies' inhabitants or keep them as slaves: Ants are usually regarded as prototypes of social beings that are prepared to sacrifice their lives for their community, but they can also display extremely aggressive behavior towards other nests. The evolution and behavior of ants, in particular the relationship between socially parasitic...

Not only the world-famous primeval horse browsed at the shores of the lake in the warm, wet climate prevailing at that time (average annual temperature, 25°C). Around Lake Messel, which emerged in a volcanic crater and was surrounded back then by dense primeval forest, lived early ungulates and rodents; the ancestors of today's birds flew over the cloudy water; insects buzzed through the air; and cold-blooded reptiles basked lazily in the sun. 47 million years ago, Messel was located at...

The prestigious Smithsonian Museum has been overrun with insects.A brand new exhibit, "Farmers, Warriors, Builders: The Hidden Life of Ants," debuts Saturday at the National Museum of Natural History and is open through Oct. 10.The display will include a living leaf-cutter ant colony from Ted Schultz, the museum's curator of ants.Also on display is a 6-foot-tall cast of an ant colony collected by Walter Tschinkel, a student of ant-nest architecture at Florida State University.There...