#61 Journey to the Ants

224 pages.

This is just my second book on Formica (ants) but my third on the order of Hymenoptera this summer.  I'm starting to get the feeling that Hymenoptera is the most fascinating order in the animal kingdom.  It is made all the more so by the writing of Holldobler and especially E. O. Wilson, whom I will definitely be reading more of in the future.  I'm looking forward to Sociobiology, which will be read in the winter.

Here are some fascinating facts about ants.

*One queen ant lived 29 years in a laboratory.
*In the northern latitudes ants that build mounds make the south facing slope more gradual so as to receive more sunlight.  This is also an easy way to determine which way is south in a country like Finland.
*Ants were the first agriculturalists, beating humans by around 60 million years.
*Males do no work, and their only function is to reproduce and then die.
*If you put oleac acid on a living ant the other ants will think it is dead and so throw it from the colony like trash.  If the ant doesn't clean itself enough it will get thrown out again until it is clean of the smell.
*Ants communicate mainly by pheromones, and they have a variety of different pheromones to communicate different messages, such as where food is, that the queen is still alive, and where an enemy is.  There is one pheromone which the authors called a Propaganda pheromone that gets the army excited and energized before a battle.
*Some ants rely on aphids for nourishment by eating their excrement which is sweet water.  They transport and protect the aphids like cattle.

These are some the interesting little things about ants that I gathered from this book, and this is not an exhaustive list.