Australian termites used for finding gold

This video is called Didgeridoo Pete at a Cathedral Termite Mound Australia.

From Australian Geographic magazine:

Scientists use termites to find gold

By Alyce Taylor

December-24-2012

Researchers are using termites to find precious metals beneath Australia’s landscape.

CSIRO RESEARCHERS ARE USING termites to track gold and other precious mineral deposits.

“A lot of Australia’s landscape is covered by a layer of material that is capping and hiding resources, so we are using termites to help see beneath that. Because they construct their nests, in part, with material which is a little bit deeper down,” says Dr Aaron Stewart, a CSIRO researcher.

Aaron is the lead author of the paper, which was published last month in the journal Geochemistry: Exploration, Environment, Analysis. The paper suggests the future of resource exploration could lie in tracking insects.

Termite mounds contain signs of gold

Termites and ants burrow into the depth of the ground where ‘fingerprints’ of underlying gold deposits are found. The insects bring traces of these fingerprints up to the surface when making their nests.

Large termite mounds in Northern Australia and Africa have previously been used in mineral exploration. But by studying termite sites in Western Australia the CSIRO research team has shown that smaller nests, which are common throughout Australia, are just as valuable in identifying gold deposits.

“Our recent research has shown that small ant and termite mounds that may not look like much on the surface are just as valuable in finding gold as the large African mounds that stand at several meters tall,” says Aaron.

Termites could be used to mine other precious metals

In the future insects could be used commercially by mining companies to determine the location of gold and other mineral deposits, according to scientists. The technique could present an environmentally-friendly alternative to invasive drilling methods.

“By developing these methods it will make life much easier for exploration companies working in areas with a lot of transported sediment cover,” says Dr Ravi Anand, who co-authored the paper. “It will also cut down the cost of exploration.”

“We haven’t demonstrated that we can use termites to find other mineral resources yet,” says Aaron. “But in principle, there is no reason why we can’t.”

Mineral resources make up $86.7 billion of Australia’s exports and new discoveries in many commodities are needed to sustain production, which pushes pioneering exploration research.

One should hope that exploiting the gold and other metals found by the termites and ants will happen without mercury or other stuff poisoning the environment of those termites and other wildlife, as happens often in gold digging.

Related articles

• Termites strike gold (csironewsblog.com)
• Termites act as tiny miners, lead humans to gold (arstechnica.com)
• CSIRO says thar’s gold in them thar ant hills! (abc.net.au)
• Gold-Digging Termites Concentrate Minerals in Bodies and Nests (theepochtimes.com)
• Termites act as tiny miners, lead humans to gold (wired.co.uk)
• Strike it Rich With Termites (neatorama.com)
• Thar’s gold in them thar termite nests! (msnbc.msn.com)
• Termite Mounds Can Help Reveal Location of Gold Deposits (sciencespacerobots.com)
• Let Termites find Gold Deposits for us! (mining.com)

Turkish ants, first checklist

This video says about itself:

Ants in Gulusluk, Turkey

Ants eating a Honey Nut Cheerio.

From Zootaxa journal:

First annotated checklist of the ant fauna of Turkey (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

KADRİ KIRAN & CELAL KARAMAN
Trakya University Faculty of Sciences, Department of Biology, 22030 Edirne-TURKEY.
E-mail: kadrikiran@trakya.edu.tr, celalkaraman78@gmail.com

Abstract

The first annotated checklist of the ants of Turkey is presented. A total of 306 valid names of species-group taxa (286 species, 20 subspecies) is recorded based on literature records and additional newly collected material carried out since 1998. Synonyms are included. New localities are added for some poorly known species.

Four species (Tapinoma subboreale, Formica georgica, Formica lugubris and Lasius balcanicus) are reported for the first time and thirteen species (Bothriomyrmex atlantis, B. meridionalis, Tapinoma madeirense, Camponotus robustus, Formica fuscocinerea, F. gagatoides, Rossomyrmex minuchae, Messor barbarus, Monomorium glabrum, M. salomonis, Myrmica vandeli, Stenamma westwoodii and Tetramorium forte) are excluded from the list of Turkish ants.

Related articles

• Turkish Delight: Turkey’s female chart toppers! (eurobeatbox.com)
• When Ants Get Together to Make a Decision (livasperiklis.com)
• Undead-End: Fungus That Controls Zombie-Ants Has Own Fungal Stalker (scientificamerican.com)
• Slave rebellion is widespread in ants (eurekalert.org)
• The March of the Giant Ants (history.com)

Ant-eating dinosaurs?

From Dinosaur Tracking blog:

October 17, 2012

Did Dinosaurs Eat Ants?

If there’s one group of dinosaurs that needs better PR, it’s alvarezsaurs. They’re among the strangest dinosaurs to have ever evolved, yet outside of dinosaur die-hards, few people have ever heard of them. They’re not one of those classic forms–the sauropods, tyrannosaurs, stegosaurs, or ceratopsids–that have been cherished for the past century. Paleontologists only recently began to uncover their bones. Alvarezsaurus itself was named in 1991, but it and its close relatives didn’t quite get swept up in the same wave of dinomania as their other Mesozoic cousins.

Alvarezsaurs weren’t big, toothy, or menacing. That’s part of makes them so special. Alvarezsaurus, Mononykus and their relatives from Cretaceous Asia, South America and North America were small dinosaurs–these feathered dinos ranged from the size of a pigeon to about the size of a turkey. In fact, these dinosaurs were so avian in nature that there was once a debate about whether alvarezsaurs were non-avian dinosaurs or birds that had lost the ability to fly. Since those early debates, numerous studies have confirmed that they were non-avian dinosaurs that were closely related to the strange therizinosaurs and ostrich-like ornithomimosaurs.

But the strangest thing of all is the mystery of what alvarezsaurs ate.

Despite being short, alvarezsaur arms weren’t wimpy. Not at all. Alvarezsaur forelimbs were very stout and included one robust finger tipped in a big claw. (Among these dinosaurs, the total number and development of the fingers varied, but they’re connected by having one finger that was bigger than the others.) In contrast, these dinos often had a reduced number of very small teeth.

Paleontologists thought they saw a connection between these traits and a life feeding on social insects. Mammals such as pangolins and ant-eaters also have stout, heavy-clawed arms and are toothless–a functional pairing that goes with a life of tearing into ant and termite nests to slurp up the scurrying insects in their nests.

Could alvarezsaurs have done the same? So far, it’s the most popular hypothesis for their bizarre nature. In a 2005 paper, paleontologist Phil Senter proposed that Mononykus would have been capable of the kind of scratch-digging needed to rip open social insect nests. Then, in 2008, Nicholas Longrich and Philip Currie described the alvarezsaur Albertonykus in deposits that also contained traces of Cretaceous termites. Alvarezsaurs seemed to have the right equipment and live at the right time to be social insect predators.

But we don’t really know. No one has published any direct evidence that Albertonykus or any other alvarezsaur ate ants or termites. The hypothesis is certainly a reasonable one, but we still need a test of the idea. Fossil feces may eventually hold the answer.

If paleontologists eventually uncover dinosaur dung of appropriate size that contains ants or termites and comes from a habitat shared by alvarezsaurs, that discovery would strengthen the ant-eating hypothesis. A cololite would be even better. While coprolites are petrified feces that have already been excreted, cololites are fossil poop preserved inside the prehistoric creature’s body prior to expulsion. If paleontologists found an alvarezsaur with a cololite containing termites, that would be direct evidence that these dinosaurs truly did snarf down hordes of insects. For now, though, we can only hope that some lucky fossil hunter makes such a discovery.

Ant slave ‘rebellions’

This video from the USA says about itself:

Acorn ant (Temnothorax longispinosus) larva close-up and a worker feeding a larva.

Courtesy of Jo­han­nes Gu­ten­berg Uni­vers­ity Mainz in Germany and World Science staff:

Slave ant “rebellions” found to be common

Sept. 27, 2012

Ants held as slaves in nests of oth­er ant spe­cies of­ten dam­age their op­pres­sors through acts of sab­o­tage, ac­cord­ing to new re­search.

Ant re­searcher Su­sanne Foit­zik of Jo­han­nes Gu­ten­berg Uni­vers­ity Mainz in Ger­ma­ny said she in­i­tially not­ed the “re­bel­lion” be­hav­ior three years ago, in find­ings re­ported in the April 2009 is­sue of the jour­nal Ev­o­lu­tion. More re­cent re­search, she said, has re­vealed that the phe­nomenon—seen among ants that are en­slaved in or­der to raise their mas­ters’ off­spring—is wide­spread.

In three ant popula­t­ions in West Vir­gin­ia, New York, and Ohio, Foit­zik ex­plained, en­slaved work­ers of the ant spe­cies Tem­notho­rax long­i­spin­os­us have been ob­served ne­glect­ing and kill­ing the off­spring of their slave­mak­ers rath­er than car­ing for them. As a re­sult, only 45 per­cent of the slave­mak­ers’ off­spring sur­vived on av­er­age—lit­tle over half the sur­viv­al rate of the slave spe­cies’ brood in its own free-liv­ing nests.

The Amer­i­can slave-making ant Pro­to­mog­nathus amer­i­canus is a “so­cial par­a­site” of an an­cient line­age that de­pends en­tirely on oth­er ant spe­cies, called the host spe­cies, to sur­vive. Slave work­ers care for the brood in par­a­site nests, br­ing food to their mas­ters and feed them, and even de­fend the nest.

The ants be­come slaves when work­ers from the slave-making ant col­o­ny at­tack the nests of the spe­cies T. long­i­spin­os­us, kill the adults, and steal the brood. Back in the mas­ters’ nest, which can be in hol­low acorns, nut­shells, or twigs, the slave­mak­ers ex­ploit the nat­u­ral brood care be­hav­ior of the emerg­ing slave work­ers. The slaves feed and clean the lar­vae, the maggot-like off­spring of their mas­ters.

“Probably at first the slaves can­not tell that the lar­vae be­long to anoth­er spe­cies,” said Foit­zik. As a re­sult, 95 per­cent of the brood sur­vives the lar­val stage. But the situa­t­ion changes when the lar­vae be­come pu­pae, or un­dergo their met­amor­phosis in­to the adult stage. “The pu­pae, which al­ready look like ants, bear chem­i­cal cues on their cu­ti­cles [shell-like skele­tons] that can ap­par­ently be de­tected. We have been able to show that a high frac­tion of the slave­maker pu­pae are killed by slave work­ers.”

The pu­pae are ei­ther ne­glected or ac­tively killed by be­ing at­tacked and torn apart, the re­search­ers found. Sev­er­al slaves at once may as­sault a pu­pa, which can­not move or de­fend it­self dur­ing the pu­pal stage and is al­so un­pro­tected by a cocoon—P. amer­i­can­us be­ing one of a num­ber of ant spe­cies which, for un­clear rea­sons, don’t make co­coons.

In par­a­site nests in West Vir­gin­ia, only 27 per­cent of the pu­pae sur­vived, and in the New York col­o­nies, only 49 per­cent, Foit­zik said. In Ohio, the sur­viv­al chances of the Amer­i­can slave-making ant was a bit high­er at 58 per­cent—but this was still well be­low the sur­viv­al rate of 85 per­cent for pu­pae of the “slave” spe­cies when in their own free-liv­ing nests.

A ques­tion is pre­cisely what mem­bers of the “slave” or host spe­cies achieve by re­belling.

“The en­slaved work­ers do not di­rectly ben­e­fit from the kill­ings be­cause they do not re­pro­duce,” said Foitzik. But their free rel­a­tives in the sur­round­ing area—which might very well be their sisters—indi­rectly ben­e­fit, she not­ed, as slave­maker col­o­nies weak­ened by re­bel­lions are less capa­ble of suc­cess­fully launch­ing new raids.

In­ter­est­ingly, Foit­zik added, ge­o­graph­ic dif­fer­ences in the slave spe­cies’ re­sponses fit pre­dic­tions of ev­o­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry that popula­t­ions will evolve dif­fer­ent traits in re­sponse to dif­fer­ent pres­sures from their lo­cal en­vi­ron­ment. An ex­am­ple: while host ants in New York are very ag­gres­sive and of­ten suc­cess­fully thwart slave raids, West Vir­gin­ian hosts prof­it more from the slave re­bel­lion be­cause, as ge­net­ic anal­y­ses in­di­cate, the neigh­bor­ing col­o­nies are more of­ten close rel­a­tives to the “re­bels.”

Heron uses ants to catch fish

The green heron from North America, using bread as bait to catch fish, mentioned in another blog post here, is not unique.

This is a video of another green heron using bread to catch fish.

And green herons are not the only heron species doing such things. And you don’t have to go to Africa to see a black heron doing its umbrella trick either.

Translated from Vogeldagboek.nl in the Netherlands:

Grey heron uses ants as bait

Marlene van Soest sent this remarkable message on a grey heron fishing with bait.

“Our garden with a pond is just outside the center of Leiden.
When disturbed the fish hide under a rock plateau.

Sometimes we feed the fish. They then go to their hideaway first and will emerge later.

During the holidays there was a grey heron, with a special way of fishing, unfortunately a successful way.

With its bill, the bird grabbed some ants who were about to fly away and dropped them into the pond.

When a few fish wanted to eat that tidbit, they were eaten themselves … “

Marlene van Soest had to span a net over the pond to save the fish.

In an earlier Vogeldagboek Dr. J. T. Lumeij (Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University), said, in response to a question by me, that it was not known whether bitterns used bait.

“Other herons do so though, like striated herons with pieces of bread or insects.

Herons use different techniques to catch prey.”

That turned out to be very true in Leiden!

English hairy ants research

This video is called Surface of nest of the Hairy Wood Ant, Formica lugubris, 14 October 2011.

From the BBC:

24 August 2012 Last updated at 06:44 GMT

Tags to shed light on northern hairy ants’ movements

By Mark Kinver Environment reporter, BBC News

Researchers are planning to fit tiny tags to a protected species of ant in order to gain an insight into the insects’ behaviour.

A team from the University of York will fit the devices to 1,000 northern hairy ants – the UK’s largest ant species.

Although ants have been tagged in laboratories before, the project will be the first to attempt to track the movement of the creatures in the wild.

The project will take place on the National Trust’s Longshaw Estate.

The site in Derbyshire is home to more than 1,000 nests and an estimated 50 million worker hairy ants.

Multiple nests

Sam Ellis, from the University of York, said the study would help answer questions about how the colony of ants organise themselves.

“The ants have this behaviour where one colony is spread among multiple nests,” he explained.

“This behaviour is really interesting because there are some places where they exhibit this behaviour, yet in other places within Europe they do not do this.

“It is unknown how why they maintain this multiple nesting.”

He added that the data gathered from tagging the ants would help shape land management projects.

“With this information, land managers will be better equipped to ensure they do not destroy a colony accidentally by cutting down a tree used by the insects to source food or damaging an area used by the ants,” he told BBC News.

The tags, which measure 1.0mm by 1.6mm, will act like a barcode, allowing the researchers to track the movements of the tagged insects.

“It allows you to build up a picture of how each individual ant behaves, and this builds up to make the colony-wide behaviour,” Mr Ellis told BBC News.

“You stick all the tags on, and then you come back the next day.

The scanner is literally like a barcode reader, so you position yourself on one of the trails between the nests, and as the ants run past, you scan it to see which ant it is.”

Jenny Gerrans, the learning officer for the National Trust at Longshaw Estate, said that the research would help shape the trust’s conservation work that was being carried out at the property.

“We are doing some tree removal and felling over the next few years,” she told BBC News.

“As part of that, we will be mapping the ants’ nests, and we will be able to give the information from this study to the contractors that will be carrying out the work.

“They will then be able to make sure that they do not ruin the tracks or paths that the ants use.”

Wood ants are a group of six closely related species found across the forests of Europe. Within the UK, there are three species. One which is found in the north of Scotland; the northern hairy ant, which is found in southern Scotland and northern England, and there is another species found in southern England.

“They are the dominant invertebrate predator, so they are not eaten by any other invertebrate – although they are eaten by woodpeckers and sometimes badgers,” Mr Ellis explained.

He added that trees – such as oak, birch, pine and larch – played an important role in the ants ecology.

“Their main food, about 60-80%, comes from aphids. They have farms, literally like we have farms, of aphids up in the trees. So they protect the aphids,” he said.

“The aphids drink tree sap, and as this is very rich in sugar, they cannot process it all so they [dump] the excess sugar.

“The ants collect this sugary water and take it back to the nests.”

The tagging is set to get underway during the summer of 2013.

Hairy giants

Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature

The wood ant is the largest native ant species in Britain, with workers measuring up to 1cm
Hairy wood ants (Formica lugubris) are a northern species in the UK, but can be found as far south as mid-Wales
They live in mound-shaped nests made of leaves and twigs, which are designed to trap heat
The ants can defend themselves from predators by spraying formic acid, a smelly acidic substance that can blister the skin
Some birds, such as jays and woodpeckers, use the defensive spraying to their advantage by using the acid as a cleansing agent to rid themselves of parasites

See also here.

New Philippines ant species discovery

This video is called Asian Weaver Ants Philippines.

From Wildlife Extra:

11 new species of ant discovered in The Philippines

An ant scientist’s picnic: The highly diverse ant fauna of the Philippines

June 2012. Intensive field work by researchers David General of the Palawan State University, The Philippines and Gary Alpert of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University has led to the discovery of nine genera of ants that had never been recorded before in the Philippines. Another two new genera were discovered by other researchers in a remote mountain region. The study was published as the 200th jubilee issue of the open access journal Zookeys.

30% known ants come from Philippines

About 30% of all currently known ant genera have been recorded in the Philippines, with a land area roughly the size of Italy or Arizona. At least 474 species of ants are known from the archipelago. In addition, several dozen new species remain to be formally described and given scientific names. “New species have been found even in highly disturbed places like university campuses,” reported Mr. General.

“The complex blend of climatic diversity, geologic history and island structure of the country has likely led to rapid development of new ant genera and species, a phenomenon that deserves much further exploration,” Dr. Alpert surmises.

Discovery site destroyed

The discoveries were made on a private reforestation project on the fringe of a single protected area, the Mt. Isarog Natural Park, on Luzon Island. Unfortunately, the study site was poached and all the trees have been cut down, wiping out 27 years of stewardship. Habitat destruction continues to threaten the ants of the Philippines and the plants and animals that depend on them.

Many islands, mountains and unique habitats remain unexplored for their ant communities.

Ants are very common and easily recognizable insects but are poorly studied in the region. This new study may spur interest and provide such a reference for people who want to study ants in the Philippines.

Brazilian “big-headed” ants use chemical trails to drag others into helping them carry food, a study shows: here.

World’s Smallest Fly Decapitates Ants: here.

Zombie ant fungi discovery in Brazil

This video is called Cordyceps: attack of the killer fungi – Planet Earth Attenborough BBC wildlife.

Four new Brazilian species in the genus Ophiocordyceps have been discovered. The fungi belong to a group of “zombifying” fungi that infect ants and then manipulate their behavior, eventually killing the ants after securing a prime location for spore dispersal: here. And here.

March 2011: A bizarre so-called zombie ant fungi which takes control over the minds of ants before killing them and sprouting from the insects‘ heads, has been found to be four separate species, rather than the one originally thought: here.

May 2012. A parasite that fights the zombie-ant fungus has yielded some of its secrets to an international research team led by David Hughes of Penn State University. The research reveals, for the first time, how an entire ant colony is able to survive infestations by the zombie-ant fungus, which invades an ant’s brain and causes it to march to its death at a mass grave near the ant colony, where the fungus spores erupt out of the ant’s head. “In a case where biology is stranger than fiction, the parasite of the zombie-ant fungus is itself a fungus — a hyperparasitic fungus that specializes in attacking the parasite that turns the ants into zombies,” Hughes said: here.

An ancient developmental potential to form ‘supersoldiers’ facilitates the recurrent evolution of this subcaste in various species of Pheidole ants: here.

Australian meat ants eat cane toads

From EurekAlert!:

Aussie meat ants may be invasive cane toad‘s Achilles’ heel

Ecologists in Australia have discovered that cane toads are far more susceptible to being killed and eaten by meat ants than native frogs. Their research – published in the British Ecological Society’s journal Functional Ecology – reveals a chink in the cane toad‘s armour that could help control the spread of this alien invasive species in tropical Australia.

Professor Rick Shine and his colleagues Georgia Ward-Fear, Matt Greenlees and Greg Brown from the University of Sydney’s Team Bufo (from the Latin name for the toxic toad) compared habitat use and activity patterns in meat ants, metamorph cane toads and seven native Australian frog species. They found that, unlike the native frogs, cane toads are poorly equipped to escape the meat ants.

According to Shine: “The spread of cane toads through tropical Australia has created major ecological problems. The ideal way to control toad numbers would be to find a predator that kills and eats toads but leaves native frogs alone. However, bringing in a predator from overseas might have catastrophic consequences, like those that occurred when cane toads themselves were brought in. So we’ve explored an alternative approach – to see if we could use a native predator. Meat ants are abundant around tropical waterbodies, and we often see them eating small toads, so we suspected that there might be some kind of mismatch between the invader and its newly invaded range, for example something about the toads’ behaviour that makes them vulnerable to a predator that poses little danger to native frogs.”

Through a series of laboratory experiments, Team Bufo looked at when the ants, frogs and toads were most active, where they chose to live, and how good the frogs and toads were at escaping attacking meat ants. They found cane toads opt to live in open microhabitats and are active during the day, patterns that match those of meat ants. By contrast, native frogs are nocturnal and are safely ensconced in vegetation or other shelters during the day, when meat ants are on the hunt.

Cane toads are also less well equipped to escape attacking meat ants, Team Bufo found. Using a specially-built runway, they tested the frogs’ and toads’ sprint speed and endurance. They found that compared with the quick and nimble native frogs, cane toads’ hops are shorter and slower due to their shorter shin bones. Native frogs were also more vigilant for meat ants than cane toads, they discovered.

The results are interesting not only because they reveal the cane toad’s Achilles’ heel – a weakness that could be exploited to help control the spread of the toxic toad – but because the same “evolutionary trap” could be used to snare invasive species elsewhere.

“The end result of this mismatch between traits of metamorph cane toads, which evolved in the Americas, and the ecological interaction between metamorph toads and meat ants in tropical Australia, is an ‘evolutionary trap’. That is, characteristics that increased toad survival where they evolved in the Americas are now a disadvantage, because the toads are facing different challenges in Australia – challenges they have not evolved to deal with. Such evolutionary traps should be especially common for invasive species, because so many aspects of their environment differ from those in which the traits of that species evolved,” says Shine.

###

Georgia Ward-Fear et al (2009). Maladaptive traits in invasive species: in Australia, cane toads are more vulnerable to predatory ants than are native frogs, Functional Ecology, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2435.2009.01556.x, is published online on 31 March 2009.

See also here.

Meat ants devour cane toads: here.

Cane toads approaching the last barriers to Western Australia: here.

Fossil ants discovered in French Cretaceous amber

From German magazine Naturwissenschaften:

Abstract: Recent studies on the ant phylogeny are mainly based on the molecular analyses of extant subfamilies and do not include the extinct, only Cretaceous subfamily Sphecomyrminae. However, the latter is of major importance for ant relationships, as it is considered the most basal subfamily. Therefore, each new discovery of a Mesozoic ant is of high interest for improving our understanding of their early history and basal relationships. In this paper, a new sphecomyrmine ant, allied to the Burmese amber genus Haidomyrmex, is described from mid-Cretaceous amber of France as Haidomyrmodes mammuthus gen. and sp. n. The diagnosis of the tribe Haidomyrmecini is emended based on the new type material, which includes a gyne (alate female) and two incomplete workers. The genus Sphecomyrmodes, hitherto known by a single species from Burmese amber, is also reported and a new species described as S. occidentalis sp. n. after two workers remarkably preserved in a single piece of Early Cenomanian French amber. The new fossils provide additional information on early ant diversity and relationships and demonstrate that the monophyly of the Sphecomyrminae, as currently defined, is still weakly supported.

Cretaceous ants: here.

Fossil insects: here.

Harvester ants: here.

The Argentine ant, Linepithema humile, is one of the most successful invasive species in the world, having colonized parts of five continents in addition to its native range in South America: here.

Aquatic animal fossils in amber: here.

Anthill in Texel museum: here.