My animal heroes, like Solomon the Wise’s, are ants. So here is another piece about them.
Had they the size to match their practical intelligence, organizational skills and strength, ants would clearly have been masters of the universe. Look at their cities, what we call ant colonies. They contain complex ventilation systems that remove carbon dioxide and bring in fresh air. They have hundreds of miles of well laid out sewers that drain waste into special recycling chambers. They have an incredibly complex transportation system including highways. Each ant city is not just an engineering marvel that keeps its millions of inhabitants comfortable but each city has its unique features. Delhi is nothing like Mumbai or Bhubaneshwar. Nor are their cities.
Each of the 11,800 species has a different kind of home.
Some ants live in underground tunnels or build earthen mounds. Others live inside trees or in plants. Some construct nests of tree leaves. Lasius fuliginous ants build ‘carton nests’ of bricks formed by chewing up pieces of wood cemented together with honeydew which they get from milking aphids.
Each colony consists of a series of underground chambers, connected to each other and the surface of the earth by small tunnels. The biggest ant colony was found in Japan with 306 million ants and 1 million queens living in 45,000 interconnected nests over an area of 2.7 sq km!
The colony is built and maintained by legions of worker ants. They dig these nests under stones, dead trees or underground. They dig with their legs and carry the earth away with their mouths. Ant nests can be just below the surface or upto 35 feet deep, Western Harvester ants make a small mound on top, but then tunnel up to 15 feet straight down to hibernate during winter. Nest building displaces a huge amount of soil. Ants constructing an average-sized mound carry 80,000 kg of soil to the surface. When you see perfect round balls or hills on the earth’s surface, this is actually balls of earth shifted from underneath by ants. An underground city is of three thousand chambers and four million ants, the approximate population of South Delhi.
The newly mated queen digs a single-chambered nest, seals herself in, and rears broods of workers, upto a 1,000 eggs a day for years. The brood hatches in a week and feeding on secretions from the queen, grows to maturity in a month. These workers forage for food for the next brood of eggs. And so the colony expands.
Like us, ants build homes for shelter, child rearing, food storage and temperature control Ant-nest design has a basic theme: vertical tunnels for movement and transport, and horizontal chambers for work, storage, and sleep. The engineer-ants who build the nest are so precise that if one group starts digging from one end and the other from the other end, they will meet exactly in the middle.
Just as we prefer to save time and money by building their houses against existing walls, red ant engineers first try to find support structures before their workers excavate the nests. In cool climates, ants build their nests under stones which will be warmed by the sun. In warm climates, especially in the tropics, many ant species nest in tree cavities, constructing nests by pulling leaves together and binding them in place with thousands of strands of silk taken from their own larvae.
Just as our houses range from single rooms to elaborate mansions, so do theirs. The little yellow meadow ant makes complex houses that are more than a metre in depth – which in human terms means an apartment block larger than the erstwhile World Trade Center. They then camouflage this huge building by covering it with vegetation. The most impressive nests are those of wood ants who build huge mounds out of pine needles and other forest floor debris that reach a metre in height, several metres in circumference and go several metres into the ground beneath the mound.
We use heaters and coolers, ants too keep the temperature within their nests strictly controlled. The Messor aciculatus ant who makes the deepest nest in the world, tunnels 4 metres down so that ant larvae can survive and grow even in winter, because at that depth the temperature remains constant all year long, cool in summer and warm in winter.
The Leaf Cutter ants make turrets on top of their nests, which can be opened or closed in case of rain by covering them with gravel or mud.
Like us, ants have specific rooms for specific purposes. Each room, 2000 in an average colony, is about 8 to 12 inches in diameter and workers are continually adding more. The chambers are used for raising larvae, food storage, garbage disposal, nursery, and even a burial chamber where ants carry in their dead from outside. The nursery for the queen and her babies is usually in the core of the nest guarded by soldier ants. The nannies who take care of the young keep the eggs and larvae in different groups and chambers according to their ages. At night they move the eggs and larvae into the deeper chambers to protect them from the cold and during the day, to the top of the nest to get the sun. The older workers get the rooms on the edges of the nest. During winter the colony hibernates in the deepest rooms.
Ants are finicky housekeepers. Special “maintenance ants” keep the nest clean and in good repair by throwing the rubbish outside the nest or into a special garbage chamber within the nest which is separate from the food and other chambers.
Like our pantry, ants have a food store. Sweet food like biscuits and cake crumbs are softened by ant saliva and stored here. Just as we keep cows in sheds, they keep herds of aphids in sheds, take them to pasture on the leaves, defend them against predators and then milk them and store the honeydew. Insects like mealybugs are allotted special guest rooms because they secrete sweet droplets as well.
Leaf-cutter ants grow their own food in well-maintained ‘fungus gardens’. When the fungus is ready, it is harvested and sent by the gardeners to the nurseries and adult dining rooms. Each field is plowed and furrowed like ours.
For some people the idea of ants having proper homes, gardens and families must be strange but it only shows the similarity of all life. The next time an ant crosses your path, remember he too is probably hurrying home from work!
To join the animal welfare movement contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.