|
|
| Subject |
Comments |
Views |
Author |
Date Written  |
|
Self-sacrificing honeypot ants
|
view preview
More than thirty species of ant have a caste known as 'honeypot ants'. These essentially act as living pantries for other ants in the colony. They consume large quantities of food until the abdomen is incredibly engorged. When worker ants lack other food sources, honeypot ants simply regurgitate out nutrients for them to eat. In some parts of the world, eating honeypot ants is viewed as a sweet delicacy.
|
|
|
0 |
4592 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
|
Don't like centipedes? They may be beneficial
|
view preview
If you have a house centipede crawling around on your floors, you’re in luck! These little guys feed on pests such as termites, cockroaches, spiders, and ants to keep your home’s biodiversity to a minimum. Adult centipedes have 15 pairs of legs that help it achieve top speeds of 0.4 meters per second. To mate, centipedes become acquainted through the touching of antennae, and the male deposits sperm onto the ground, which the female then uses to fertilize her eggs.
|
|
|
1 |
4198 |
duddy |
10 years ago |
|
Ants: Crashing picnics for 158 million years
|
view preview
There are over 12,000 species of ants in the world, and a new tree of life has been published to better understand how they are all related. Their evolutionary origins have been traced to the tropics in South America, where they play a critical role in maintaining the health of the ecosystem.
|
|
|
0 |
3285 |
duddy |
11 years ago |
|
Ant careers
|
view preview
It turns out that ants are capable of making career moves.Computer tracking of ants shows that colonies have three main occupations: nursing the queen, cleaning, and foraging for food. Younger ants typically stay near the queen, but as they get older, they make the transition to foraging. This transition with regards to age was an exciting discovery, giving more insight into ant behavior. Source: http://www.nature.com/news/tracking-whole-colonies-shows-ants-make-career-moves-1.12833 ...
|
|
|
0 |
3619 |
ehd123 |
11 years ago |
|
Termites are nature's architects
|
view preview
Termites are pretty astonishing creatures by anyone's standards -- their queens are thirty times the size of soldiers and they produce an amazing thirty eggs per minute. Relative to their size, termites build the largest structures in the animal kingdom. Their towers can reach an incredible 25ft (7.6m) high and 40ft across (12.1m) - and that's just above the ground! They can burrow as far as 225ft (68m) below the surface.
|
|
|
0 |
4262 |
duddy |
11 years ago |
|
Sunda pangolins
|
view preview
Sunda pangolins have become the most frequently seized mammal in the illegal wildlife trade in Asia, as smugglers sell the creatures to meet culinary and medicinal demand. These gentle insectivores are now on the endangered species list.
|
|
|
1 |
6500 |
bio_man |
11 years ago |
