Ants looked at the main advantages of being hymenopteran and said... nah. I guess stinging is OK... (Though most ants don't sting.) ... but most of this is nothing compared to going eusocial.
Personally I think eusociality is such a huge advantage this makes sense.
But then why aren't the bees who do both more successful? Are they too specialized?
Electronics repair,
finding small leaks in systems that need to be airtight,
You could put cameras on Dinomyrmex gigas and use them for search and rescue
spying on people
keeping the apartment clean (ants that pick up debris and put them in the trash)
sorting anything tiny...
weeding gardens (ants could remove unwanted seedlings)
pest control generally
@futurebird@davidr Presumably they’re not omnivorous enough to be effective in municipal waste disposal (e.g., have them eat all the organics at landfills).
@futurebird I still think about the study where someone glued little stilts on ants to figure out whether they counted their steps based on how long their legs were to figure out how to get home (the answer was yes, they do. The stilts ants got lost. Which makes me sad. I hope they reunited them with their colonies anyway. I am too sentimental for research.)
Just... some grad student with a magnifying glass and pile of tiny stilts and a little brush.
@futurebird Green biology PhD students gets to to so many strange things during their years.
My thoughts goes still to those who was stumbling around in the Nevada (?) desert holding plastic sheets over a foraging ant to test if changes in the sunlight would affect their abilities to find their way back home again.
@davidr@futurebird@michaelgemar Ants might be pretty good with finding land mines, too- they have a good sense of smell, & are too light to trigger the mines.
(I’ve heard that bees already have some of this franchise, but it’s not like there aren’t plenty of minefields to go around.)
@davidr@michaelgemar@futurebird Seed cleaning? (That is, separating seeds from hulls, chaff, & any incidental bits of trash.)
I’ve heard that ants can be very good at removing seeds from freshly planted fields & gardens, so maybe not even very much training involved.
There's one gardener who used to live locally, that when he found aphids, he would put out the correct herbs to attract wasps, which would then clear up the aphids for him. :D
@michaelgemar pest control. Imagine you could hire a soldier ant army to go through a building and take out anything that’s an insect. @futurebird@davidr
Another issue with the Hymenopterans is that there are xylophagous sawflies, and sawflies generally have a bunch of social ... but not eusocial behaviors. And YET termites evolved from roach like bugs... not from wood munching sawflies. Make it make sense!
@futurebird we get pergid sawfly lava on the paper bark trees around where I live and they look like wart-ridden alien slime babies and of course we love how perfectly horrid they are.
@futurebird Termites are because eusociality is a beacon for evolution like being a crab is.
I read a great book on termites & I keep remembering bits of it when I should be thinking of something else.
@futurebird what if there were widespread eusocial xylophagus sawflies for millions of years, and then they went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, and it's just chance that we happen to live in this little window of time without eusocial sawflies, and the luck of the fossil record that we don't know it?
@futurebird Conical piles of tiny pebbles help harvester ants Pogonomyrmex spp stay warm in winter. Harvesters on my land all had their pebble piles flattened in a huge hailstorm. They haven't made much progress, winter is coming. Should I help them rebuild? How? Ideas? Thanks for considering this question.
Whenever I've tried to help ants, if I try to do something they don't like it and "fix" it. But giving them easy access to favorite materials went better.
@futurebird OK! I found two remains of apparently long dead harvester hills. I'll gather their largish sand grains and distribute them among the five flattened but active hills.
Add comment