Posts tagged ants
canmom:
the oldest known ant fossils date back to around 100 million years ago in the mid cretaceous and became ‘ecologically dominant’ around 60 million years ago. the current world population of ants is estimated to be between 10^15 and 10^16. worker ants tend to live 1-3 years, queens up to 30 years, but drones only a few weeks.
so… if we arbitrarily assume on average an ant lives for a year for ease of calculation, and that the ant population has been on average the same for the last 60 million years (unlikely, but we could imagine this is the inflection point of a logistic curve), we could estimate the number of ants to have lived in that period as between 6E22 and 6E23.
the upper bound of that is actually pretty close to avogadro’s number! so we can say that
the number of ants to have ever lived is roughly
one mole
“Ethereum won’t enable computers to become as socially intelligent as primates, but it might make them as emergent as funghi and ants—which in terms of biomass are the dominant species on the planet.”
–Alex van de Sande
A million ruby-throated hummingbirds will consume much more food than one African Elephant, even though both have about the same biomass (3,000kg, or 3.3 US tons). Thus, ants, as a group, may actually consume more resources per year than antarctic krill, even though both may have roughly the same biomass, because ants tend to be smaller, and live in warmer environments. Although there may be about 10-15 times the biomass of termites than cows in the world, studies have suggested that termites might produce almost 30,000 times as much methane per year because of their faster metabolism.
http://www.antweb.org/antblog/2010/10/do-ants-really-have-the-largest-biomass-of-all-species-on-earth-laurie-usa.html
Science is an exercise in curiosity about nature. It is a process. It sometimes involves complex and costly apparatus, or the resources of giant institutes. Sometimes it involves looking at ants in an ant farm, and knowing some clever math. Many people are gobsmacked by the technological gizmos used to do science. They think the giant S&M dungeons of tokomaks and synchro-cyclotrons are science. Those aren’t science; they’re tools. The end product; the insights into nature -that is what is important. Professors Ryabko and Reznikova did something a kid could understand the implications of, but no kid could actually do. The fact that they did it at all indicates they have the child-like curiosity and love for nature that is the true spirit of scientific enquiry.
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/on-the-empire-of-the-ants/
The team reared six colonies of carpenter ants (Camponotus fellah) in the lab and tagged each worker with paper containing a unique barcode-like symbol. The colonies — each comprising more than 100 ants — lived in flat enclosures filmed by overhead cameras. A computer automatically recognized the tags and recorded each individual’s position twice per second (see video below). Over 41 days, the researchers collected more than 2.4 billion readings and documented 9.4 million interactions between the workers.
http://www.nature.com/news/tracking-whole-colonies-shows-ants-make-career-moves–1.12833