Sunday, December 16, 2007

Interesting Ants

Sunday, December 16, 2007
There is a separate world for ants.It is different and more organized.Lets peep into their world and know their lifestyle.
  • The legs of the ant are very strong so they can run very quickly. If a man could run as fast for his size as an ant can,he could run as fast as a racehorse.
  • Ants can lift 20 times their own body weight.
  • The ant has two eyes, each eye is made of many smaller eyes.They are called compound eyes.
  • The abdomen of the ant contains two stomachs. One stomach holds the food for itself and second stomach is for food to be shared with other ants.
  • Like all insects, the outside of their body is covered with a hard armour this is called the exoskeleton. Ants have four distinct growing stages, the egg, larva, pupa and the adult.
  • Each ant colony has at least one or more queens and all other ants are workers.Like the queen(s), all worker ants are female.Males, whose only job is to mate with young ant queens, live in the colony nest only at certain times. After mating, a male soon dies.
  • The job of the queen is to lay eggs which the worker ants look after. Worker ants are sterile, they look for food, look after the young, and defend the nest from unwanted visitors.
  • Ants are clean and tidy insects. Some worker ants are given the job of taking the rubbish from the nest and putting it outside in a special rubbish dump!
  • If a worker ant has found a good source for food,it leaves a trail of scent so that the other ants in the colony can find the food.
  • Each colony of ants has its own smell. In this way,they easily recognize intruders and if they find any foreign ants in their colony,they will attack them straight away.
  • The Slave-Maker Ant raids the nests of other ants and steals their pupae. When these new ants hatch,they work as slaves within the colony.
  • At night the worker ants move the eggs and larvae deep into the nest to protect them from the cold. During the daytime, the worker ants move the eggs and larvae of the colony to the top of the nest so that they can be warmer.
I always kill my time watching ants and providing them food during my exam days.I have a blind sentiment that i get good marks if i do so,hehehe.

1 comments:

Idyll Mind said...

interesting! i am very intrigued by ants too. i saw a documentary a few days ago on nat geo on how ants are useful ecologically and scientifically... and that they are eaten in many parts of the world, including in india ...