Living habits of yellow silk ants

Ants develop into completely mutated forms. All ants live in social groups. Generally speaking, there are four different kinds of ants in a group.

1. Queen ant: The female with reproductive ability, or female ant, or queen ant, is the largest in the colony, especially with large abdomen, developed reproductive organs, short antennae, small chest and feet, wings, wings falling off or no wings. The main responsibility is to lay eggs, breed offspring and manage this big family.

2。 Female ant: A female with reproductive ability after mating. After mating, she lost her wings and became a new queen ant, commonly known as "princess" or "angel".

3. Male ant: or father ant. Small head, undeveloped upper jaw and slender tentacles. There are developed reproductive organs and external genitalia, whose main function is to mate with the queen ant, commonly known as "prince" or "mosquito".

4. Worker ants: capable ants. Wingless, undeveloped female, usually the smallest individual in the group, but the largest number. The compound eye is very small, and the monocle is very small or not. The maxilla, antennae and three pairs of feet are well developed and good at walking. Worker ants are infertile. The main duties of worker ants are to build and expand nests, collect food and feed larvae and queens.

5. Soldier ant: "Soldier ant" is a common name of some ant species, and it is a female ant without reproductive ability. With a big head and a well-developed upper jaw, it can crush hard food and become a fighting weapon when defending groups.

Ants formed a group, which was also known through marriage and flight. Love at first sight after acquaintance, mating in flight or after flight. The groom won't live long.

The ants died soon after mating, leaving the "widow" queen ant to live a lonely life alone. The queen ant takes off her wings and chooses suitable soil and place to nest underground. She is "fighting alone" and her strength is limited. She can only temporarily build a small room as a place to live, so that her pregnant body has a delivery room. After the eggs in the body mature and produce, the larvae hatch and the queen ant is busy. Every young ant is fed food from her mouth until these young ants grow into adults and can live independently. When the first workers grow up, they dig holes to the outside world to find food, and then expand the building area of their nests to provide housing for more and more family members. From then on, the queen ant who had suffered a lot sat down to enjoy life and became the commander-in-chief of this big family. The work of raising young ants and feeding queens is undertaken by worker ants. But the queen will continue to lay eggs to breed everyone.

Family. There are many forms of ant nests, most of which nest in underground soil, dig tunnels, secret rooms and houses, and pile up excavated materials and leaves near the entrance to form hills for protection. Some ants use leaves, stems and petioles of plants. Build nests and hang them on trees or rocks. Other ants live in rotten wood in forest areas. More specifically, some ants nest in or near other kinds of ant nests; There is no dispute between the two "families" and they can live in harmony. This kind of ant nest is called mixed ant nest, but it is actually heterogeneous. No matter different ants or ants of the same species, the number of ants in a nest can be very different. The smallest ant colony has only a few dozen or nearly a hundred ants, and some have thousands, while the big ant colony can have tens of thousands or more.

In the broad-leaved forest in the south of China, there is a kind of jumping-tailed ant, whose tail with pliers often tilts up. It likes to build an ant nest the size of a football on a tree with sapropelic juice secreted from its mouth and sapropelic bark chewed from the tree. Ant nests are divided into many grades. There are males, queens and workers. Jumping-tailed ants give birth in their nests and become an "independent kingdom". At first, there was a tree and a bird's nest. When the ant colony is too big and a new queen is born, the new queen leads some worker ants to build new homes. Sometimes for the sake of the field, we often fight. They catch insects on the branches and leaves of the tree crown for food. In order to shorten the walking distance on the tree, they also built an "ant rope bridge" between the trees. In order to connect the two trees for a long time, the worker ants who undertake the task of bridging constantly update the "Ant Cable Bridge". When all the food on the tree is caught, they catch the worms on the ground. Once the prey is caught, the jumping-tailed ants will inject anesthetic solution with claw needles, put the prey into a coma, and then drag them back to their nests in droves. Even a mantis or earthworm weighing more than 0/00 times its own weight/kloc-can easily drag it back to its nest.

The feeding habits of ants vary greatly from species to species. Generally, it can be divided into carnivorous, phytophagous and omnivorous ants. Before the cold comes, ants bring aphids, scale insects, horned cicadas and gray butterfly larvae to their nests, ready to absorb the excrement of these insects as winter food (milk honey); They also carry weed seeds before the cold comes to prepare for sowing in the spring next year.

The creatures formed by interaction with ants have reached an amazing level. There are more than 52 families, 465 species of plants, thousands of animals, and a large number of unknown fungi and microorganisms.

Ants are using extraordinary survival strategies-planting fungi, harvesting seeds, grazing honey-producing insects, nesting, cooperative predation, social parasitism and slavery-which greatly stimulated the curiosity of scientists and the public.

The secret that ants can live in every corner of the world is that they live in a very organized group. They build nests together so that their eggs and offspring can grow safely in them.

Ants have different division of labor. The queen is responsible for laying eggs; Worker ants are responsible for building and defending nests, taking care of queens, eggs and larvae, and finding food; Males are responsible for mating with queens. Most eggs will develop into females. They are called worker ants. A small number of them developed into queens and males. The new queen and the male ant mate when they are mature, and the male ant dies after mating. The new queen ant began to lead another new group to start a new life.

In the ant colony, the queen ant is the only ant that can lay eggs and reproduce. It is the mother of all ants in the ant colony. Worker ants feed it, clean its body and take its eggs to another place to take care of it.

Some ant populations in Australia regard their worker ants as a living storage box. When worker ants collect a large amount of nectar and hide it in their bodies to swell up, they hang themselves on the ceiling of their nests until other ants come to eat the nectar stored in their bodies.

The soldiers are foraging in the woodland. In order to find food, they sometimes line up in woodland. They are always hungry and will attack anything, even large mammals.

Harvest ants eat seeds. They collect seeds in the cellar. Leaf-cutting ants eat mushrooms. They take leaves underground to cultivate mushrooms. Another ant stores an insect called an aphid. They extracted a sugary substance from aphids as food, similar to human milking.

According to scientists, ants are short of sugar in caves. Once ants find something sweet, their tentacles will harden on their own, which is a nature of ants.

Ants are very social insects and communicate with each other through pheromones emitted by their bodies. When ants find food, they will spread pheromones on the food, and other ants will instinctively drag things with pheromones back to their holes.

When an ant dies, its pheromone still exists. When other ants pass by, they will be attracted by pheromones, but dead ants will not communicate with each other (touch their tentacles) like live ants, so their bodies with pheromones will be taken back by their companions as food.

Usually, such corpses are not eaten as food, because apart from pheromones, each nest of ants has its own specific smell, and things with the same smell will not be attacked, which is the basis for good cooperation with ants in the same nest.

In the process of marching, ants secrete a pheromone to guide the ants behind them to take the same route. If we cross the ant's marching team with our hands and interfere with the pheromones of ants, ants will lose their sense of direction and crawl around. So let's not disturb them casually.

Ant is a typical social group, which has three elements: individuals can cooperate with each other to take care of their larvae; Have a clear division of labor system; And future generations can take care of the previous generation for a while.

In addition, it should be pointed out that "termites" are not ants, and termites are very different from ants in physiological structure except for their different social life habits.

Biological behavior refers to the adaptive activities that organisms can perceive from the outside. Behaviorism is the study of these activities. Morphology and behavior were first noticed by people, but it was not until the19th century that people obtained the theoretical weapons and experimental means for the study of biological behavior. The theory of evolution has raised the behavior of animals to an adaptive level.

The classification of biological behavior is very confusing. From the perspective of heredity and development, it is generally divided into innate behavior and acquired behavior, namely instinctive behavior and learning behavior. However, this classification method is not commonly used. People generally classify behaviors according to their functions. Unfortunately, this classification method is not strict, and there are a lot of overlapping areas. According to the measurement of mechanics, an ant can lift things more than 400 times its own weight, and can also haul objects more than its own weight 1700 times. Mark Morfett, an entomologist at Harvard University in the United States, is a scholar who has a good knowledge of Asian ants. According to his observation, 10 more than one united ant can carry maggots or other food more than 5,000 times its own weight, which is equivalent to 10 carrying 3,500 tons by a big man with an average weight of 70kg.

Things, that is, the average person carries 350 tons. From the perspective of relative strength, ants are well-deserved Hercules. Why can small ants have such divine power? Scientists have done a lot of research and analysis, which proves that ants are a treasure house of micro-animals' nutrition, and each100g of ants can generate 2929 kilojoules (700 kilocalories) of heat. Scientists have found that the leg muscles of ants are an efficient "engine", and this "muscle engine" is composed of billions of tiny "small engines". That's why ants can produce such extraordinary power. The "muscle engine" of ants uses a special "fuel", which is a phosphorus-containing compound with a very complicated structure, called adenosine triphosphate, which is ATP. On many occasions, as long as the muscle produces a little acidic substance in the process of activity (this feeling is what we usually call "arm ache"), it can cause this kind of "fuel" to change dramatically, which can make the long molecules of muscle protein contract in an instant and produce great power. This special "fuel" can directly release hidden energy and convert it into mechanical energy without burning. In addition, there is no mechanical friction, so there is almost no energy loss. Because of this, the efficiency of ant's "muscle engine" is very high, which can be as high as 80% or more. This is the mystery of "Hercules Ant".

Why are ants many times stronger than themselves? Ants are small animals in the animal kingdom, but they have great strength. You will be very surprised if you weigh the ant and the things it carries. The weight it lifts is almost 100 times its own weight. No one in the world has ever been able to lift anything more than three times his own weight. In this sense, ants are much more powerful than people. Where does the strength of this Hercules come from? It seems that this seems to be an interesting mystery. After a lot of experimental research, scientists finally debunked this "mystery". It turns out that the muscle in the ant's paw is a very efficient "prime Mover", which is several times more efficient than the aero-engine, so it can generate considerable power. We know that any engine needs a certain amount of fuel, such as gasoline, diesel, kerosene or other heavy oil. However, the "muscle engine" is provided by a special fuel. This "fuel" does not burn, but it can also release hidden energy and convert it into mechanical energy. Without combustion, there will be no heat loss, and the efficiency will naturally be greatly improved. Chemists already know the composition of this special "fuel", which is a very complex phosphorus compound. In other words, in the claws of ants, there are billions of tiny motors as power. This discovery aroused scientists' strong desire to make an artificial muscle engine. From the development point of view, if powerful and dexterous automation equipment like ant claw is used in technology, it will cause fundamental changes in technology, and then the emergence of elevators, cranes and other machines will be completely new. The cranes we use generally work by motors, but the efficiency of doing work is far from that of ants. Why? Because thermal power generation relies on burning coal to turn water into steam, and steam drives the impeller and drives the generator to generate electricity. In this process, chemical energy is converted into heat energy, heat energy into mechanical energy, and mechanical energy into electrical energy. In these processes, part of the heat energy generated by combustion runs away in vain, and part of it is consumed by overcoming the friction generated by mechanical rotation, so the efficiency of this engine is very low, only 30 ~ 40%. Ant "engine" uses special "fuel" in muscle to directly convert it into electric energy, with little loss, so it has high efficiency. Inspired by the ant "engine", people made a fuel cell, which directly converted chemical energy into electrical energy. This battery uses fuel for redox reaction to generate electricity directly. It has no combustion process, so the efficiency is very high, reaching 70 ~ 90%. Ants are social insects, living in groups and having their own homes. Most ants' homes are underground, where they can't easily find rich food. When the weather is sunny and warm, we often see swarms of ants crawling on the ground. If you look carefully, or if you sprinkle some bread crumbs in front of it, you will see that when they reach the food place, they begin to carry the delicious food you prepared for them. If one ant can't move, two, three or more ants will come up and move together. When they get food, they will climb home in an orderly way along their own route and drag the food back to the storage room for a full meal later. This is the role of pheromones.