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Monthly Archives: June 2013
Science: Beauty of the Ant
During my Ph.D.-studies, I was lucky enough to be able to attend the so-called ‘Ant Course’. This is a course on ant taxonomy, and it was in Borneo that year. The course is organized by Dr. Brian Fisher, a curator … Continue reading
Science: Breath of Life
In Malaysia (among other places) exist the so-called ‘Kerangas’, forests which occur on nutrient-poor sandstone hills. Kerangas actually means ‘land which cannot grow rice’ in the Iban language. Being nutrient-poor, plants have a hard time growing there. One plant, called … Continue reading
Science: Ants don’t care for nature conservation
In Mauritius, an island nation east of Madagascar, lives a plant species called Roussea simplex. This plant normally gets pollinated by the beautiful blue-tailed day-gecko (Phelsuma cepediana), a gecko that’s often kept as a pet. However, due to human activity, the … Continue reading
Posted in Ant science
Tagged ecosystem, interference competition, invasive, mutualism
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Science: How to tease your fellow ants even more
Remember my previous post about ants throwing rocks in the entrance of other nests? Turns out that there is another ant that takes this interference behaviour to a whole new level. In the Lower Sonoran desert, two ant species like … Continue reading
Science: Shattered dreams
Imagine you are a newly born virgin ant queen. You have dreams of one day flying off, mating with a nice male (or even several!), getting settled somewhere, and start building your very own colony. But then…your dreams get shattered … Continue reading
Something Else Sunday: I’m not sick, I’m awesome!
As an organism, you basically have two things to worry about: 1) Surviving 2) Reproducing Both these things cost quite some energy. For the reproduction part, one often sees that males signal their quality to the female, which costs energy. … Continue reading
Science: Living bridges
A very interesting group of ants are the army ants. Instead of having a colony like most ants, army ants are nomadic. They basically set up camp, called a bivouac, of which the ‘tent sail’ consists of living ants. From … Continue reading
Science: How to tease your fellow ants
What happens when your species of ants likes to eat exactly the same things, in the same area as another species of ants? Well…you basically have two options: 1) be better than your opponent at finding/exploiting this food 2) mess … Continue reading
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