Latest news with #ants
CBC
15-07-2025
- Science
- CBC
This plant peacefully houses warring ant species by giving them their own apartments
When Guillaume Chomicki sliced into the bulbous part of a plant growing on the side of a tree in Fiji, he expected to find it filled with ants. After all, it was Chomicki and his colleagues who first proved that Squamellaria plants have a symbiotic relationship with ants, providing shelter in exchange for nutrients. What he didn't expect, though, was to discover two colonies of ants from two different species inside the same basketball-ball sized tuber. "It doesn't really make sense," Chomicki, an evolutionary biologist at the U.K.'s Durham University, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "Ants are known to be very aggressive and territorial." Chomicki is the lead author of a new study, published in Science, that shows how Squamellaria plants house warring species of ants by building them their own little walled-off compartments with separate entrances. The researchers liken it to a landlord/tenant relationship. Gotta keep 'em separated Squamellaria plants are epiphytes, which means they don't have roots that attach to the soil. Instead, they grow on top of other plants and trees. They produce round, mostly hollow tubers that Chomicki says are like "huge potatoes the size of a soccer ball or even larger." In Fiji, they're known locally as "testicles of the trees." "They are huge, quite hairy dangling things up the trees. So I think the name is quite self-explanatory," Chomicki said. Because these plants are not rooted, they rely on other sources for their nutrients. That's where the ants come in. The tubers make for excellent accommodations for ant colonies, giving them protection from the elements and predators. In turn, the ants fill the tubers with detritus and defecation, which provide sustenance for the plant. But while Squamellaria love ants, and ants love Squamellaria, ants don't usually like other groups of ants. "In general, a species does not co-operate with multiple unrelated partners," Chomicki said. "Because the same partners would be competing for the same resources, and that could lead to the collapse of the whole system." Squamellaria plants, it turns out, have a solution to this conundrum. Chomicki says 3D scans reveal the tubers contain a "network of galleries." "These galleries are not carved by the ants. They are made by the plant itself. It's all plant genetics," Chomicki said. "All the ants are in different compartments, and that's exactly what makes the system stable." Breaking down barriers leads to carnage Each compartment has its own entrance to outside, the study found, but they are completely walled off from each other. When Chomicki and his colleagues broke down those walls to see what would happen, all hell broke loose. "They have been living together for years, but the second that I cut these walls that separate them, a huge fight broke [out], and in half an hour, pretty much all the ants were dead," he said. Aaron Fairweather, an entomologist in Guelph, Ont., who wasn't involved in the study, called it "super cool," and says the findings illustrate the "incredible world of complexity in these micro-habitats." "I've studied a lot of ant/plant interactions," they said. "Finding out about, you know, the kind of apartment-style situation that this plant has with a bunch of different ant species is just really fascinating." Fairweather wasn't surprised to learn the ants in the Squamellaria plants fought to the death once they were made aware of each other's existence. There are an estimated 20 quadrillion ants on the planet, and Fairweather says they often wage war with each other. "One of the interesting things about ants is they are so successful in the environment that they no longer really need to compete with environmental factors or other species per se," Fairweather told CBC. "But they have to compete with other ants, which are as successful as them." And when they fight, Fairweather says, it's not pretty. "They start grabbing legs and tearing off limbs and antennae go flying and heads are popping," they said. "It's brutal." All the more reason, then, for them to have some space to themselves inside their Squamellaria homes. "Forming symbiosis with multiple ... species of ants is something that that theory was always predicting is not possible. You know, the system cannot be stable. And here I've shown that this is actually possible," Chomicki said.
Daily Mail
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
ALEXANDRA SHULMAN'S NOTEBOOK: Perfect night is ruined... by a swarm of flying ants
We were in the garden early one evening last week, planning to have supper with friends and enjoy the long, warm night. The wine was opened, the dips were in place and the gossiping had started. And then, we started to notice them. The ants. At first there was the odd one on the table which could be swiped away, but soon it became obvious something very strange was happening. The ants were flying in rather than crawling up from the floor, landing on our arms, legs and in our hair, dropping into the glasses of wine. Being very British and wanting to make the most of this warm weather, we tried to ignore them, but eventually there was no denying that this was deeply unpleasant. The ants were falling down the front of shirts and dresses. Ant-laced houmous is nobody's ideal dip. I feared for what would happen once I brought out the pasta. Eventually we admitted defeat and moved back indoors. 'It's the Night of the Flying Ants,' my friend Fran said, which sounded like an old Eastern proverb rather than an actual event. But she turned out to be correct. It was indeed The Night of the Flying Ants, which is a brief period when young queens leave their nests to mate and start new colonies. They leave on the same night but unfortunately, they hang around romancing for several days. It happens during a very hot spell, usually in July. I have yet to discover whether there is a connection between the ants and the swarm of ladybirds that stopped play at the Test Match between England and India at Lord's the following evening. I'll never learn to get over tennis FOMO FOMO – the fear of missing out – is not a condition I suffer from in any circumstance other than around tennis. I couldn't care less about not being invited to a party, but with a fantastic Wimbledon that has kept me glued to the telly more than ever, I lament not being part of a tennis-playing gang. To put this into context: I used to be quite good at tennis. As a child I had lessons and our father was determined his offspring would play brilliantly. 'Keep your eye on the ball till it hits the racquet,' he would shout. Although I was never a likely rival to Martina Navratilova, I was passable. Tennis was one of the few games I enjoyed, and until relatively recently I played singles matches and also felt confident enough to join in a game of doubles, not minding if I was the least talented player. But in the past year or so something has changed and in comparison to others around me I am now really hopeless – and the more hopeless I am, the less inclined I am to play. It's not helped by my entirely unscientific survey of tennis players of my acquaintance, which concludes that they come into the hyper-competitive personality type. There is an obvious solution to all this, which would be to have some lessons, but that is where the problem really lies. As soon as I have to learn something, it becomes a chore rather than a pleasure, so despite the fact that I could no doubt scrub up my game, I stubbornly refuse to get coaching. The odd foray into taking lessons only confirms that I simply don't want someone to tell me to change my grip. So, the truth is I'm probably stuck now as the outsider. Perhaps it's not traditional FOMO I am experiencing but Frustration Of Missing Out. With only myself to blame. We all have one of doze days, Hugh... My sympathies to actor Hugh Grant, who was shown on television having a nice snooze in the Royal Box at Wimbledon. As a borderline narcoleptic myself, I am frequently falling asleep at inappropriate moments. The last was at home at a dinner we were giving when I jolted awake to hear myself saying to my boyfriend, much to the astonishment of the assembled guests: 'David, I think it's time we went home.' Why the caped look is out of this world It's hard to know what's going on with the trend for caped evening wear. Both Brigitte Macron and the Princess of Wales appeared in caped gowns at the Windsor State banquet last week, while Princess Maxima of Netherlands wore a vibrant lime green caped jumpsuit at a Nato summit in The Hague. They certainly looked impressive but in a strangely androgynous comic book way. More like an empress in a sci-fi world than a glamorous woman on Earth. Failed memory test I won't easily forget On the 'no good deed goes unpunished' front, I was invited to take part in a survey by Imperial Health Care. Since Imperial were in charge of an operation for cancer I had last year, I thought I should give something back for their research and agreed. The first section was fine, with the usual enquiries about previous illness, gender, race etc. The second part was about cognitive ability. No problem, I thought. But by their calculations I come into the bottom 30 per cent for my age in just about every category including planning, verbal reasoning, and delayed and immediate memory. I accept I'm never going to be a good tennis player but… really? Accessories that are only for moneybags It's unfathomable that anybody would pay £7.4 million for a handbag, even the original Birkin just sold at Sotheby's. But then it's equally unfathomable that the most sought-after contemporary handbags cost what they do. The Row's Marlo leather bag comes in at £5,380 and is the go-to for those-in-the-know wealthy shoppers. Worth is only what somebody is prepared to pay.
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Science
- New York Times
This Jungle Plant Is a Good Landlord to Its Tenant Ants
On a hot and sticky day in Fiji in 2014, Guillaume Chomicki, an evolutionary biologist at Durham University in England, cut into a tuber the size of a soccer ball with a few leafy branches. The plant belonged to Squamellaria, a collection of species that grow on trees and are known for housing buckets of ants in what Dr. Chomicki previously showed to be a mutually beneficial relationship. Each type of Squamellaria specializes in offering a different species of ant a nesting site that's safe from predators and torrential rains. (In rainforests, there is a glut of ants with a scarcity of lodging options.) The ants, in return, provide crucial nutrients in the form of their feces to the rootless plants. The ants also carry the plants' seeds to new bark crevices, allowing the next generation to flourish. As Dr. Chomicki dissected the tuber, expecting to find a single kind of ant, he instead discovered something surprising — two distinct colonies of ants belonging to two different species. Different groups of ants are notoriously violent toward one another, so Dr. Chomicki was puzzled by how the species could coexist without causing the whole plant-insect enterprise to collapse. In a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, Dr. Chomicki and his colleagues show that some of these plants manage to serve as careful landlords, creating individual housing for up to five colonies of different species of ants, each within its own separate compartment. This feat of botanical architecture allows the insects to cohabit peacefully, creating abundance for multiple colonies and species within a single tuber. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
South China Morning Post
10-07-2025
- South China Morning Post
South Korean restaurant's ants-topped dishes bug food safety officials
A South Korean restaurant caught serving ants to 'add acidity' to its dishes may face charges for violating food safety regulations. Advertisement The unnamed eatery reportedly garnished several of its menu items with three to five ants each, delivering about 12,000 servings of these dishes from April 2021 to January this year and earning a total of 120 million won (US$87,400) in revenue from them, according to Korea JoongAng Daily. The country's food and drug safety ministry had referred the restaurant and its owner to prosecutors for potential violations under the Food Sanitation Act, authorities said on Thursday. An investigation was launched after posts showing the dishes appeared on social media and blogs. 'To use ants as food, businesses must obtain temporary approval for standards and specifications under food safety regulations,' a ministry official said. Advertisement 'We have shared the results of this investigation with the relevant local government and requested administrative action.'
The Sun
27-06-2025
- General
- The Sun
B&M's £1 pantry staple will banish flying ants from home – as ‘tens of millions' of insects to swarm UK in just DAYS
THE B&M pantry staple that will keep pests out of your home, as experts warn this year's Flying Ant Day could be one of the biggest in recent years. This handy hack offers a low-cost, toxin free way of keeping the pesky insects away ahead of pest control experts' warnings. 2 Ground pepper can be used to deter ants from your home and is available for £1 at B&M. A study from Vanderbilt University says that ants have 400 smell receptors which allow them not only to smell their immediate surroundings, but also play a role in their communication and navigation. That is why putting down strong scents like pepper can help to deter them, as it will overload their receptors. Cheap trick to keep your home pest free There are a couple of different ways that you can use the pepper deterrent. The easiest is to simply sprinkle it in areas where you typically see ants in your home. However, you can also use it to mix up a makeshift bug spray, offering a cheaper alternative to forking out on insect repellent. By mixing one measure of pepper to ten measures of water you will create a spray which can then be used throughout your home. A Texas A&M University showed that water with pepper is more likely to kill ants than water alone. Where to spray the ingredient in your home However, be careful not to spray it near where your pets might be, as it could cause irritation to their respiratory system or cause an upset stomach. Pest control experts are anti a significant surge in flying ant activity this year, as a result of the ideal combination of altering wet and warm weather. Biggest flying ant day in recent memory This summer's particularly high humidity is perfect for swarming. Experts have suggested that year's Flying Ant Day - the annual mating flight where millions fill the skies in synchronised displays - could be one of the biggest in recent years. Paul Blackhurst, Head of the Technical Academy at Rentokil Pest Control, told Manchester Evening News: 'While flying ants may disrupt your picnic, barbeque, or pub garden pint, they play a vital role in the ecosystem.' He added: "This natural event, when vast numbers of winged ants, known as alates, take to the skies at once in search of mates from other colonies, could be one of the most prolific for years." Keep pests out all summer IF you want to ensure that your home is pest free this summer, here's what you need to know. Hornets and wasps - hate the smell of peppermint oil so spraying this liberally around your patio or balcony can help to keep them at bay. Moths - acidic household white vinegar is effective for deterring moths. Soak some kitchen roll in vinegar and leave it in your wardrobe as a deterrent. Flying ants - herbs and spices, such as cinnamon, mint, chilli pepper, black pepper, cayenne pepper, cloves, or garlic act as deterrents. Mosquitoes - plants, herbs and essential oil fragrances can help deter mozzies inside and out. Try eucalyptus, lavender and lemongrass.
