How do ant colonies manage the nutrients in their food? Biologists have shown that an ant colony functions like a "collective mouth and gut". The members of a colony are capable of dealing with the ...

A mighty struggle for ultimate power, with calls of "death to the queen" answered by armies of workers, is routine in some ant colonies. Queen ants are therefore sometimes forced to take care of ...

Ant colonies survive because individuals are willing to die. New research shows that some of the most vulnerable members, immobile pupae sealed in their cocoons, can sense when they are fatally ...

It's an effective trick if you can get away with it.

Ants have an incredible capacity to work together for the good of the collective, but a freshly discovered species shows just how far they are willing to go. Colobopsis explodens has been observed in ...

Ants - champion weightlifters and builders, soldiers, queens, drones, all toiling diligently to populate and maintain colonies, which for some species can span miles. And then there are the slackers - ...

And then there’s Sceptobius lativentris. Parker’s research revealed that the adult beetles turn off their ability to produce CHCs altogether. This likely allows Sceptobius to go stealth long enough to ...

A research team from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology has shown in a new study that ants returning from habitats ...

For creatures with very small brains, ants build strikingly complex societies. How a colony of hundreds or thousands of ants maintains order remains poorly understood, but new high tech research ...

Biological Sciences Asst. Prof. Christina Kwapich became hooked on ants after reading “The Ants” by Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson when she was about 9 years old. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book set ...