#august2019

Carpenter Ant - Camponotus pennsylvanicus

Looking at this array of pictures featured in today’s post, two observations are immediately clear. Firstly, Carpenter Ants feature relatively prominent mandibles if you can get a good look at the front of their head. Secondly, they will travel to and through all manner of environments if it means a successful foraging for their colony. If there’s something edible to be found, they’ll claim it. And they will get other nestmates from the colony to help secure and transport the find. In terms of actual communication between individuals, Ants are highly sophisticated, as would be expected for eusocial insects in a colony numbering in the thousands (at minimum). When a crucial source of food or object of interest has been found by a foraging worker, that worker can relay the information to her nestmates by using her antennae or by creating a pheromone trail for others to follow. The use of scents, scent cues and specific pheromones is fundamental here! Not to say that the other senses of an Ant are lacking, but their vision and the sensory hairs along their body can only get them so far in terms of Ant-to-Ant communication and environment navigation. 

Getting back on track, a worker Ant can furthermore directly administer relevant information to other worker Ants chemically through transfer of her saliva. While it looks like worker Ants may be feeding each other at a glance, the reality is that the vital information one worker has can be swiftly delivered from worker to worker until the information arrives at the colony. Of course, Ants do also employ saliva-swapping/sharing behavior in order to tend to the young larvae developing in their nurseries, and supply them with nutritious food for their metamorphosis. Despite how fearsome those mandibles can be for protection of the colony or outright aggression towards onlookers or nest intruders, they can be surprisingly tender during an exchange with a nestmate. In terms of the individuals here, the individuals on the concrete haven’t found any food, but they could certainly sense the approaching vibration of my footsteps. Meanwhile, milkweed leaves and pine branches prove to be more fruitful, as the individuals here have uncovered a bounty of honeydew and pine sap respectively. Sugar-based food is quite valuable energetically, so the more individuals that can arrive to lap up the material and bring it to the colony and queen, the better. Finally, just because there’s honeydew around, doesn’t mean that other animals/insects should get comfortable around these foraging Ants. Unless you are a Bug who can excrete honeydew regularly, it’s better to keep distance or have a defense ready or an escape. Ants communicating with strangers usually leads to ruin for any recipient who can’t “speak” Ant. For the Condylostylus (Longlegged) Fly seen in the image below, its wings allowed it to escape when the rightmost Carpenter Ant became inquisitive. 

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