{"id":270327,"date":"2017-04-08T14:54:17","date_gmt":"2017-04-08T18:54:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rael.org\/?p=270327"},"modified":"2020-11-13T15:17:25","modified_gmt":"2020-11-13T20:17:25","slug":"big-builder-ants-and-tiny-guard-ants-live-together-in-one-nest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/pt-pt\/big-builder-ants-and-tiny-guard-ants-live-together-in-one-nest\/","title":{"rendered":"Big builder ants and tiny guard ants live together in one nest"},"content":{"rendered":"
RAEL\u2019S COMMENT:<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n
Animals teaching a lesson to humans: love each other and share this planet even if you have different skin color, religion or shape\u2026<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One is a massive black ant, the other is a tiny, only distantly related, brown ant. But together they form a perfect team to build and guard a shared nest.<\/p>\n

This insect odd couple is found in the forests of the Lamto Ecological Reserve in Ivory Coast. The 15-millimetre-long\u00a0Platythyrea conradti\u00a0is a highly skilled engineer, building nests from the organic material \u2013 like leaf mulch \u2013 it finds in its environment. Small species then move into the organic matter \u2013 providing the large ants with a ready meal.<\/p>\n

One species the large ant doesn\u2019t eat is the 2.5-millimetre-long Strumigenys maynei. This small ant moves into the nests, where its highly aggressive nature helps deter any unwanted invaders.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a remarkable and rare example of cooperation between two ant species that share little in common,\u201d says Thomas Parmentier, an evolutionary biologist from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. \u201cOne is large and the other minuscule, they belong to unrelated genera and have markedly different behaviour.\u201d<\/p>\n

Together, though, they can maintain a safe and efficient home, he says.<\/p>\n

The rare association was\u00a0first recorded in 2001, when\u00a0Christian Peeters\u00a0and his student Kolo Y\u00e9o, from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, were looking for wingless queens of\u00a0P.\u00a0conradti\u00a0in the Lamto reserve.<\/p>\n

Small surprise
\nAfter finding the trees where these ants make their nests, they sawed off a few branches and took them back to their lab. When they split open the branches they were surprised by what they found.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is when we discovered the reddish \u2018tiny ant\u2019 that nested in separate small chambers close to the big ants,\u201d says Peeters. At that time, however, Peeters was only interested in the big ants.<\/p>\n

Some 15 years later, the unusual ant colonies are being investigated in more detail. Parmentier and Y\u00e9o \u2013 now director of the Lamto reserve \u2013 collected 10 nests and examined the behaviour of both species, tracking their aggressiveness and studying the odours they produce.<\/p>\n

Parasitic species often sneak into nests by producing odours that match those of their host. But the team\u2019s results show that, in this case, both species produce unique odour cues as they move around the nest. Despite this, the species are almost never aggressive to one another.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was astonishing that both ant species tolerate each other\u2019s presence in spite of clearly distinct nest-mate recognition cues,\u201d says Parmentier. But he says the biggest surprise was how the ants behaved towards intruders.<\/p>\n

Like small pitbulls
\n\u201cThe large\u00a0Platythyrea\u00a0ant was very shy and avoided direct confrontations with smaller enemies. The\u00a0Strumigenys\u00a0ants were, in contrast, small pitbulls which attacked and deterred enemies very efficiently,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Other ant species are known to form comparable relationships, but the relationship rarely remains mutually beneficial. In some cases, one species benefits while the other receives no advantage. In other cases, one species becomes a parasite, benefiting at a cost to the second species.<\/p>\n

But these two ants seem to form a truly mutually beneficial relationship, called parabiosis, because the two species share a common home and both gain.<\/p>\n

It is still unclear why they might cooperate, says Parmentier. Perhaps the larger ants lack a defence worker caste and the smaller ants took on the job and in return can benefit from the small prey thriving in the nest constructed by\u00a0Platythyrea.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2121545-big-builder-ants-and-tiny-guard-ants-live-together-in-one-nest\/<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RAEL\u2019S COMMENT: Animals teaching a lesson to humans: love each other and share this planet even if you have different skin color, religion or shape\u2026  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":282659,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-270327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noproxy.rael.org\/pt-pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}