Anthill biography

Now on the site 0 users and 7 guests. Califman biography of one family member of what is still told is not yet clear, perhaps, why marks are applied to ants. Now it will become clearer. Not just create a colony only from young or only from old individuals. But such experiments were done, in one anthill left the old, in the other - young ants, and there both forced them to be built, or educate larvae, or defend themselves from the enemy attack.

Only one who at least once tried to complete such an experience knows how many difficulties have to be overcome, finding out the habits and abilities of ants of different ages. In order to more accurately follow the course of the life of individual ants, the way of “founding” is very good. Cocoons with dolls of one species are transferred to the nest of another, sharply different from it.

After waiting for the appearance of ants, they observe the fate of these very nature of the thundered strangers. Such an attempt also does not always succeed the first time. If it was a success, the results of the experience must be checked, and repeatedly. Each grain of new knowledge gained when repeating experience helps to figure out how the anthill lives. It is clear that different forms and species have to be studied in different ways, applying to their features and mores.

Step by step, moving into the area of ​​the unknown and patiently unwinding puzzles, naturalists find out the laws of an ant life. It is one thing, for example, ants, in which all workers are outwardly the same. In such types, the behavior of an insect in natural conditions changes depending, first of all, on age: young ants do not leave nests; Only having matured, they cross the threshold of the house and begin to run out of its limits.

In the first hours of life, while the chitin robe is still soft, the ant is not at all busy. And after the chitin darkened and strongly, young ants can sit in a cell with dolls for some time. The ants that have just been born are completely peaceful. Combat instincts wake up in them only with time.

Holding for military affairs, they occupy posts on the line of defense of the nest, from where they then move on to external fishing. But for construction, when there is a need for this, young ants can begin very early, almost immediately after leaving the cocoon, not even having time to completely darken. Something this happens in simple species in which working ants are the same.

But the more diverse the forms of insects that make up the family are, the easier it is to notice the special purposes of various individuals. In the chapter telling why not all ants are the same, it was said that the abilities of the young ant, the differences in his behavior from birth are associated with the structure of his body, with his physical type. However, for each ant with age behavior is clearly changing.

With all this, in the actions of a separate insect of any kind, his individual “tastes”, “vocation”, his “character”, which has already become clear from the experiments of Chi, has already been invariably manifested and confirmed by many other studies. Thirty -five individually numbered workers of the Mirmik ruble with a uterus and about three dozens of larvae and dolls were settled in a simple five -tedaming nest.

For ten days, this nest was examined three times at certain hours. If you do not delay the observations, and especially if you carry out an inspection in red light, to which the ants do not react, then the lighting and examination do not disturb them at all. The shutters were sliding in the nest, and the cameras were checked one after another. With each observation, they protocolized, which is currently busy with one or another ant.

The calculation showed that almost half of the anthill population is absorbed in the concerns of brood. Researchers, who have spent many months in nests with numbered ants, assure that there are individuals who constantly, all their lives do the same thing. There can be very few such highly specialized ants. Apparently, even in the largest families, this is only units and they fulfill it when there is a need for this, as if the role of a mentor - an example, a model for other family members, whose abilities are not so clearly expressed.

Most of the working ants are more or less equally adapted in order to take care of brood, and in order to build and repair the nests, and in order to defend them and attack strangers. So, there are ants-managers who are particularly sensitive to a particular need or another that the family experiences. If such an ant is removed, it will replace it with another.

In a healthy family, any of its need is satisfied with some ants, and needs depend on different reasons. Firstly, the time of the year is important.At the time of summer rains in the anthill, the most builders; By the time when feeding feeds, there are more foragers in the family; When the nest has a lot of brood, there are more nannies; Campaigns begin - the number of ants, most warlike or best adapted for defense and attack, is definitely increasing.

On the other hand, the state of the family, its composition, the number of insects are important. When the family has enough young ants, the old ones usually act outside the nest, and if for some reason there are not enough old ones, young people come to the forage. Strong overgrown families of the reapers of messages or leaflets Attin consist of very diverse working forms. Here, along with almost one and a half centimeter, but not at all awkward ants, distinguished by an excessively large head, there are whole series of more and more smaller workers; The smallest is the nimble three -millimeter liliputs.

But neither one and a half centimeter giants, nor five times smaller lilliputs are found either on mounds-dos or close to them. Middle workers alone are striking in the eyes. And this is natural: the liliputs are concentrated in the most secluded cells, in the depths of the anthill, where you do not immediately get to the bottom of it, and giant guards are hidden in the upper layer of the dome, in the zone adjacent to the entrances into the nest.

If you disturb the nest on top, the guards come out; If you dig deeper, you can see the Liliputov. In this regard, there is no law that is the same for all species, but it seems that larger ants are more often timed to the outer boundaries of the nest, and small crumbs act inside the anthill. However, it is necessary to take into account the age of insects. The observations described here over the ants placed on the day of their exit from the cocoon, as we see, helped to find out something regarding the structure of the family from different types.

But the study, of course, did not stop there. Measuring ants caught at the moment when they performed certain work, and determining the average body size for each group, it was possible to detect that there are classes that are definitely related to the size of the individual. In the families of some leaf -tags, for example, there are "first defenders of the nest." These are those large -headed giants that are found at the entrances in the attacked anthill.

The next two groups of slightly smaller insects are porters, tractors. They most often transfer the cut sheet to the nest. Ants of different sizes can be engaged in cleaning and construction of leaf cutters. In the depths of the anthill, the smallest individuals were discovered, which make up the group of “nannies-educators” and “Gardeners-Gribovodes”, which are further described in more detail.

It is enough to measure at least a hundred of our forest forms taken from the surface of the disturbed nest, and a hundred foragers removed from the tree, collecting food for the same family. The measurement results invariably show that the defenders of the nest is somewhat larger. If you repeat the same on the ants of other groups, it turns out that the foragers who return to the nest with a complete zobik, smaller than their brothers-carriers, carrying grains of sand, grains of resin, wreckage of needles.

All these ants found on the roads around the nest, loaded with grains, dead insects, fragments of the needles, lumps of the earth and other building material, began to be marked with different signs. The study was aimed at checking whether there are more fractional specialization among porters: “plant food collectors”, “animal food hunters”, “loaders delivering building materials”.

No, they did not find anything like that, but they established that there are quite a few ants, “ricks”, that is, those who carry other ants on the roads around the nests. They also began to mark them - carrying and inconsistent - in different marks. There was also no order here, but the researchers found that in the group of ants, bringing all kinds of cargoes to the nest, along with real porters, there are also imaginary ones.

In the chains of movers, pulling out different material to the nest, there were quite a few ants with empty bins. And their zobiki also turned out to be empty. What is the meaning of their idle run? It was not just to unravel this riddle. But there was nothing mysterious when it turned out that it turned out that “empty movers”, “imaginary porters” in columns are, as a rule, ants living in their age.

And, completing the life path, they continue to serve the family - however, now only by the fact that their confident run along the multiple -aged highway allows you to quickly move loaded young tractors. Say, by the way, that thanks to the same experiences, in particular, it was possible to open the fact of the so -called constancy of the tracks, that is, to prove that the movers usually use the same roads.If on some ant road to mark the movers carrying building material in the lines, and a few days later come here again, then often most of the swept ants are found here, although this time they can drag not only needles, plant fibers or grains of resin, but also dead insects, grains, or even their brothers in the nest.

Returning to this road at certain intervals of time - after several sunny days, after the thundercloud, after the rain strip - it was possible to find out what exactly, what circumstances support the attachment of the movers to certain routes. Inconscious service researchers were an invaluable service in scientific search, small families made up of ants stanned on the day of exit from the cocoon.

Such families formed from insects of the same age settled in glass nests and in the wild. Here it was possible to make sure that in the anthills of many species there is also an alternation of responsibilities, although it is far from as clearly as in the hive of honey bees. The reapers, for example, are a crumb of an ant four to five days after the birth “nurses” the brood in the depths of the nest.

The same ant-crush was found later in other, also deep, cells where he waved the grain. From here, the anthole-lamp moves on, for some time spends on the outskirts of the nest and only after that begins to leave the anthill, becomes a forager: it is taken to extract and deliver food to the family. The oldest ants are no longer engaged in any campaigns, but they still do not sit in the dungeon.

They usually stay close to the entrances to the nest, moving noticeably slower than their younger brothers. To protect the house? From the old ants there is little use. But then why? Like the old leaf cutics, the old reapers, apparently, serve the last service to the family, do they give any ultrasonic signals from here, do they reinforce the calling diaper of the family, helping to navigate those members who are in hedes?

The biographies of ants of other species rich in forms are also similar. A young tiny ant, having completed and darkened, becomes a nanny-nursing, after which it swarms, snoops in deep fodder chambers, later engaged in cleaning-it takes out garbage, removes the corpses, then becomes a builder, moving from one zone to another, the young ant is gradually moving from the core to the outskirts, from the depths-up, from the bowels-closer to to the closer output.

It is better not to take impatient for these observations. To explore the life path of individual ants, you need to stock up with endurance if you hurry with conclusions, you might think that there are no duties of duties, that they are born and die inside the nest without changing the habitat. Only quite long observations allow us to establish that this is not so that the ants-carrix, like its larger brothers, also replaces responsibilities, and with them the habitat in the nest.

This is happening at the dwarf, however, wumbling slowly.