An Ant Experiment

A few days ago I read a National Geographic article about ants,

They were focusing mainly on weaver ants; they’re reddish/biggish/toughish ants that cocoon-like colonies made of leaves in trees. They glue the leaves together using their larvae’s silk, and boy, are they strong! The article said that if the ants feel like they are under attack by something, they would spray this acid that would burn and make your nostrils feel like they’re on fire and everything. They are not to be messed with! They even showed a picture in the magazine of the tearing apart what looked like a soldier ant. Now, I’ve written whole posts about soldier ants in the past, so I’m not going to go into much detail about them here, but if you really want to know what they’re capable of, use the search box at the bottom of the blog page. But here’s the short explanation of them: soldier ants swarm in millions, soldier ants kill whole animals, and soldier ants got massive mandibles. Yeah, the pretty much sums them up. So anyway, for a few weaver ants to take down the big bad soldier ants sounded like a pretty crazy idea. But National Geographic had never steered me wrong before, so I thought, weeeell…maybe. I told my Dad what I had read, and he gave a big, fat N-O wright from the get-go. Turns out we actually have some weaver ants in our front yard. The good thing is that they’re not offensive like soldier ants, so they don’t usually bother us; the article in National Geographic just claims that they have a really wicked defense. Also, my Dad pointed out was it really a soldier ant that they were pulling apart in that picture in the article? I hadn’t thought about that, I mean, all ants do pretty much look the same. Conveniently, on that day when we were having the debate, our yard was being invaded by none other than soldier ants. So my Dad had an idea; we would take a small weaver ant colony from one of our trees, and place it in the middle of the soldier ant death highway. I thought that sounded cruel; how could these calm weaver ants do anything against soldier ants? So we finally compromised on bringing a few of the soldier ants to the weaver ants instead of the other way around. And here was the verdict: weaver ants can do A LOT against soldier ants. A LOT. Now before I describe the weaver/soldier battle, lemme explain that this situation would never, ever happen in nature. Soldier ants don’t climb trees. Usually. I think. And weaver ants definitely don’t go around looking for a fight with the big bad ant bullies. As far as I know. So there was no way at all for the weaver ants to have even known how to attack soldier ants, because they weren’t designed to do so. The soldier should be very happy that they aren’t. Veeery happy. The weaver ants creamed them. In seconds. They had strategy; the weaver ants saw that the soldier ants were just biting wildly, like my dog. So what they did was pick the soldier ants up by their mid-riff, and squeeze them to death with their mandibles. The soldier ants really didn’t have a chance to attack, actually; that’s how fast the fight ended. But then my Dad pointed out that the ones that the weaver ants were fighting were the smaller soldier ants, not the bigger ones born for battle. So we decided to go with the original idea and we snipped the colony off of it’s branch, and dropped it in the middle of the soldier ant swarm. And guess what? This time, it was a tie. When the big soldier ants came, the weaver ants saw the huge jaws up in front, saw they stayed a reasonably distance from that area, while ripping the legs off of the body. Weaver ants can think. I’m beginning to think that they’re smarter than some Homo Sapiens that I know. But the reason why it was a tie was because of this (this is the really interesting part): the soldier ants stopped attacking. Why? Because the weaver ants did not register as a threat and they didn’t register as food to the soldier ants. Crazy right? Well, it turns out that if the soldier ants do not see something as a potential food source they don’t try to rip it to pieces. And I can prove it too; the nurse weaver ants who were trying to escape with the babies were the ones who were getting the biggest onslaught by the soldier ant armies; baby ants are food I guess. We also put a wrench in the soil in the middle of the soldier ant army. They swarmed over it for a second or two, but then left it alone. But who would have one if the soldier ants did see the weaver ants as a threat and/or food? I would say the soldier ants; in the end, their masses would overwhelm the larger weaver ants, even if all they do is bite and rip. But if there weren’t as many of them, the weaver ants would be able to beat the soldier ants any day. They have much more of a better strategy. Not really the result that you guys were expecting, huh?

P.S: We got the two kittens, and my sisters named them Night and Harry Potter. One boy and one girl.

Signing off,

The Traveler