futurebird,
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Fact of The Day: Most photos of weaver ants show an ant angry that a photographer is too close to her tree.

twizzt, (edited )
@twizzt@sauropods.win avatar

@futurebird

Hmm... I do have some good behavior pics but yeah...

llewelly,
@llewelly@sauropods.win avatar

@futurebird
this toot immediately made me wonder what eats weaver ants, since they don't live with anteaters.

and the answer is ... humans! Apparently weaver ants are delicious and nutritious!

futurebird,
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

@llewelly

"We turned to a weaver ant for her reaction to this additional fact"

llewelly,
@llewelly@sauropods.win avatar

@futurebird a choice expression!

llewelly,
@llewelly@sauropods.win avatar

@futurebird
today I learned fossil weaver ants from the Miocene were found in Kenya!
https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/images/8/8e/Wilson_%26_Taylor_1964.pdf

Gobabu,
@Gobabu@mastodon.social avatar

@llewelly @futurebird
Prehistoric ants hunted wholly mammoths ?

llewelly,
@llewelly@sauropods.win avatar

@Gobabu @futurebird
ha ha ha, that would be wonderful if true, but these ants lived millions of years before the woolly mammoth evolved (in the Pleistocene), and Kenya was far too warm for woolly mammoths.

anyway it reminds me of a weird web page I ran into waaay back in about 2005, all about some person's hypothesis that the parasites which cause mange in some animals had jumped to mammoths and gave them mange and played a role in the extinction of the mammoths.

futurebird,
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

@llewelly @Gobabu

I love this image of the fossil ants from the paper. They are pupae, but something about them makes it feel like an Egyptian burial with these poses.

futurebird,
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

@llewelly

That link isn't working for me... here is a better one to the same paper:
https://antcat.s3.amazonaws.com/3731/3511.pdf

llewelly,
@llewelly@sauropods.win avatar

@futurebird
somebody the other day was asking why some ants pupate without cocoons, and here is a clue:

from near the top of pg 101: "Cocoons are omitted by many of the diverse species of Polyrhachis that are arboreal and use silk produced by their larvae for nest construction."
...
"The absence of cocoons is, therefore, correlated, but not perfectly, with the arboricolous habit."

llewelly,
@llewelly@sauropods.win avatar

@futurebird oh, thank you, it worked for me, but I have no idea how long it took because I wandered off to go do something instead of waiting for it, and then long after coming back I eventually remembered it and by then it had downloaded.

futurebird,
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

@llewelly

I think people who eat them mostly eat the queens when they swarm... ?

llewelly,
@llewelly@sauropods.win avatar

@futurebird huh. I somehow did not realize this in my brief web-searching and reading.

futurebird,
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

@llewelly

I think I might have mixed them up with leaf cutters, leaf cutter queens are a South American delicacy. With weavers it's all the ants.

That explains a lot about the photos!

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