Wingless ants that fly, by Yanoviak, Kaspary and Dudley: Nature
February 11, 2005
After jumping or falling off a branch, the ants glide backwards to the trunk of the tree
STRI visiting scientist Steve Yanoviak from the University of Texas, research associates Robert Dudley, from the University of California, and Michael Kaspari from the University of Oklahoma published “Directed aerial descent in canopy ants” in Nature (Feb 10, 433: 624-626).
Many tree-dwelling animals use gliding flight to get from tree to tree, like lizards and arboreal snakes. Now, similar behavior was observed in wingless ants living on rainforest canopies on BCI, La Selva and near Iquitos, Peru. With simple experiments and videos, the researchers show that after jumping or falling off a branch the ants avoid landing on the vegetation or the ground beneath by visually aligning themselves with the 'home' tree and gliding backwards to the trunk. Tropical forest canopies maintain a large percentage of the planet's species, including ants, an important part of their associated organisms. They have developed numerous adaptations for their arboreal lifestyle, but many ants fall from the canopy as result of being dislodged by wind, arboreal mammals or birds. Workers of Cephalotes atratus will also voluntarily drop off tree trunks when approached by a foreign object.
This behavior is paradoxicalbecause worker ants lack wings,and the possibilities of falling into the forest floor and find their way to their colony is low. In their article, Yanoviak et al. show how these ants rarely reach the forest floor. Instead, they control their aerial descent such that they glide back to their host tree trunk, preventing a landing in the understory and facilitating a return to the nest in minutes.
(Information taken from Nature and Yanoviak et al.) The discovery was picked up by a large number of news services.
MSNMB provides easy access to the video “When ants fly” featuring Yanoviak, at:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6940729/
Print article
More articles
Comments
