Animal of the Week -- September 15, 2008

Wherever you look in the news this week, one thing is for sure: ants are where it's at.

First off the news that a blind, subterranean species of ant with huge mandibles discovered in the Amazon a couple of years ago represents a whole new ant subfamily, provides unique insights into the origins of ants. Ants arose from wasps, but perhaps all living ants are descended from ancestors that once lived underground permanently. So weird is this ant that it's name, Martialis heureka, suggests that it might have come from the planet Mars (Martialis). The huereka presumably harking back to the Archimedean cry of scientific enlightenment. Taxonomists are crazy!

By contrast, this week's actual animal of the week is an example of totally uninspired taxonomy: Formica rufibarbis. Now, you may well think that this is a cocktail of downers mixed on a 1970s composite plastic worksurface, but it's actually the red (rufi) barbed (barbis) ant (Formica -- the most familiar ant genus). The naming of this ant is totally lazy, it is indeed, a bit red and what's more it has little barbs on its back... and it's an ant. Taxonomists are, most of the time, boring! But for all that laziness, there is currently a great effort to save this ant from extinction in the UK.

Although widely distributed, the red-barbed ant is never common within it's range from Portugal to Siberia, and in the UK, its highly picky living requirements mean that it can only be found on St Martin's in the Scilly Isles (and why not, that's nice enough) and Chobham in Surrey -- presumably moved there for the schools. However, the mainland population has declined so much that only one colony remained, and due to a reproductive quirk of the species that only produced females. Now the Zoological Society of London and partners are reintroducing captive bred nests, some of males, some of females, onto heathland in Surrey.

The ants have fared poorly in the UK due to habitat destruction. To ease the tranisition for the captive bred ants great effort has gone, not only to preparing suitable habitat for them, but into trying to remove one of their main enemies in the natural world -- Formica sanguinea. This latter ant steels larvae from other colonies and raises them (ahhhhh, that sounds alright -- sort of like Madonna or Angelina Jolie) but then makes the matured ants do all their work for them! As the red barbed ants are released on Chobham downs on Monday, I wish them all the success in the world and salute the work of the tireless souls who work to ensure their continued presence on this sceptered isle.

Animal of the Week -- July 16, 2007

Well, it's that time of year again, when an afternoon outside becomes a constant battle against foe whose endless onslaught is like nothing seen outside a Lord of the Rings battle scene. No sooner have you shaken one from your hair than another lands in your cleavage, and when you've picked that out, you find three have landed in your drink/on your ice cream/in your mouth. And what is this haphazard winged plague of summer? Lasius niger (black garden ants), that's what.

You may wonder what triggers this aerial onslaught, when generally ants aren't that noted for their flying, and are most annoying for dying in your sugarbowl. Our insect tormentors are either queens, the most prominent fat ones, or males, the little ones that you see but don't really mind about because they're much less custardy. This is the only time that the ants will fly, hence their lack of proficiency.

On this, their nuptial flight, the males and females will mate, and with the juices of the male safely apportioned, he will die, the queen will lose her wings and tunnel underground and begin to lay eggs. The fertilised eggs hatch and the larvae become female workers. Throughout the rest of the year the colony swells as more and more workers hatch out of the never ending supply of eggs from the distended and immobile queen. The colony spreads further and further looking for food, getting into your cupboards dying in the threads of your jam-jar lids, wandering off with the contents of picnic baskets, and getting in your pants. What else do ants do?

As summer approaches, the workers decide it's time for the success of the colony to be spread even further, and they select some eggs (still fertilised by the product of the nuptial flight) to raise as dispersing queens, and the queen lays some unfertilised eggs that will become males. Triggered by cues of daylength, temperature, and humidity with astounding and fearsome synchronicity colonies all over an area crack open and the winged horde takes flight. The mass eruption means that queens of one colony might mate with males of another rather than with their own brothers.

The flying menace some years reaches such proportions that they clog air-conditioning and trigger mass congregations of sea gulls and swallows, which come to feast on the glut. Humans deal with the event by flapping, moaning, squashing and beating them from the sky with badminton racquets. I say let them be, they'll be gone as soon and as suddenly as they came.

One downside of black ant for the gardeners among you is that they farm aphids, protecting them from predators while harvesting a sticky secretion called honeydew (the nasty smut that gathers on a car parked under a lime tree). In the picture, a black ant is carrying an aphid in its jaws.