Smithsonian Museum Of Natural History, Washington presents an exhibition named 'Farmers, Warriors, Builders: The Hidden Life of Ants' running through October 10, 2009.
Ants dominate the small-scale world. We may seldom notice them, but ants affect their ecosystems as much as humans do.
And much like us, ants achieve domination by being social creatures. They must cooperate with each other to meet their basic needs for food, shelter, and defense. How they do this can look both strikingly familiar and bizarre.
Visitors to this exhibit will join ecologist and photographer Mark W. Moffett and other Smithsonian scientists as they expose the hidden life of ants. Get a look at life from an ant's point of view with large-format photographs of ants going about their daily business, a cast of an underground ant city, and a live ant colony.
How do ants stay in touch with their nest mates?
Text messaging is out, but they have other ways to communicate. Ants use pheromones (chemical signals), physical touch, and sometimes the vibration of their bodies to send messages about food, enemies, and the nest.
Ant nests are found almost everywhere, and come in an incredible variety of shapes and sizes.
Some ants dig deep and build large, complex, underground cities with varied and specialized chambers. Other ant species simply use tree leaves—or even their own bodies—to create their nests.
Group hunting, producing crops, and raising other animals for meals are some of the solutions that both human societies and large ant colonies have evolved to obtain a large amount of food efficiently.
Members of larger societies have to work together to accomplish major tasks that no one person, or ant, could do alone. To contribute effectively in these groups, the individual members have limited, but specialized, skills. Among ants, the worker's physical size and shape often determines her role in the colony.
The workers in small ant colonies often hunt for food alone.
Instead of dividing up the labor as ants in large colonies do, each worker must be able to accomplish a variety of tasks—locating, catching, and killing its prey before bringing it back to the nest.
Biological warfare. Weapons of mass destruction. Suicide missions. Demilitarized zones. Large-scale invasions and one-on-one combat. Not only humans go to war.
Ants have developed a variety of strategies for protecting their food and the nest, or wresting resources from other colonies. Stingers that inject poison, powerful jaws, mass raids, ritualized combat, and patrol guards—all are methods found within the ant world.
The picture shows the jaws of the waiting Odontomachus ant open 180 degrees to catch this grasshopper. -- www.mnh.si.edu
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