We’re listening to the sounds of ants, responding to an intruder in their nest. And, as we’ll hear in a moment, these insects have reason to be protective. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
Nate Sanders is a graduate student of biology at Stanford University. During the summer, he studies ant behavior in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.
“Now these species are omnivores, and that means they eat all kinds of things: they eat seeds and termites and other insects and each other. So they compete for all these things and resources are very scarce here. They go out and eat at the same times of day and eat the same things. So you would imagine that there could be pretty fierce competition, or the interactions between these colonies could be really, really intense. And they are.”
In the competitive world of ants, some species engage in elaborate schemes to foil their neighbors while they find food
“This ant that I study, Aphenegaster, they do this weird thing called stone dropping. And that means that each morning, they send out a few workers to nearby colonies, and they pick up tiny little stones and bits of leaves and twigs and stuff and drop them in the entrance of the other nest, before those workers get to come out. So if you could imagine that you’re an ant colony and some other species is dropping these stones and twigs in, then it’s going to delay when you can start sending out your foragers. It’s blocking up their nest entrance, so they have to get all this junk out before they can really go out.”
Pulse of the Planet is presented by the American Museum of Natural History. Additional funding for this series has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.