Free Republic

Ants are among the most familiar insects on Earth today, but their origins remain cloaked in deep evolutionary history. Until now, the oldest known ant specimens came from amber deposits in France and Myanmar, dating to the Cretaceous period around 100 million years ago. But a new discovery—published recently in the journal Current Biology—pushes that timeline back even further. “Our team has discovered a new fossil ant species representing the earliest undisputable geological record of ants,” said lead author Anderson Lepeco in a recent statement. “What makes this discovery particularly interesting is that it belongs to the extinct ‘hell ant,’...

The two men had entered Kenya on a tourist visa and were staying in a guest house in the western town of Naivasha. Their lawyer said that her clients did not know what they were doing was illegal. Two Belgian teenagers who were found with thousands of ants valued at more than €8,000 and allegedly destined for European and Asian markets will be sentenced in two weeks, a Kenyan magistrate has said. Njeri Thuku, sitting at the court in Kenya's main airport, said she would not rush the case but would take time to review environmental impact and psychological reports...

Agricultural officials in Southern California are battling an active infestation of red imported fire ants that are "highly aggressive in nature," and pose a risk to California's agricultural economy. The infestation occurred at a private property in Montecito, in Santa Barbara County, according to a recent press release from the Santa Barbara County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office. Located over 90 miles north of Los Angeles, Montecito is best known as a celebrity enclave with Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle among the town's residents. Officials did not name the owners of the private property. Venom released from the...

Open Your Mind, and Your Mouth You might think of eating insects as something kids do on a dare. But some of these little animals are popular around the world for their nutritional value -- and they’re starting to catch on in the U.S. Not long ago, sushi and lobster didn’t seem all that appetizing to Americans, so it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.

The African Matabele ants are often injured in fights with termites. Their conspecifics recognise when the wounds become infected and initiate antibiotic treatment. A Matabele ant tends to the wound of a fellow ant whose legs were bitten off in a fight with termites. (Image: Erik Frank / Universität Würzburg) The Matabele ants (Megaponera analis), which are widespread south of the Sahara, have a narrow diet: They only eat termites. Their hunting expeditions are dangerous because termite soldiers defend their conspecifics – and use their powerful mandibles to do so. It is therefore common for the ants to be injured...

For your consideration. Five Million Years to Earth The 1967 version was a remake of the original Quatermass and The Pit from 1953. If you're not desensitized by modern bombastic film making, it's a frightening film. Listen carefully, you'll hear it's a warning from the nascent world of the arts. 5 million years ago the primates were modified by the dying Martian race of arthropods. They evolved from that modification. And that hive mind lurks in us all and periodically, because that's their way, they purge all who do not respond to the power. Anyone who would not be affected...

The family of a late Georgia mother believes she died of a severe allergic reaction after she stepped on a fire ant pile at her home. After her tragic death, Cathy Weed is being remembered as a mother to everyone on Mountain View High School’s baseball team, for which her 15-year-old son plays. The team’s players stood side by side with each other on the field Sunday to honor her. Weed died Saturday after relatives say she stepped on an ant pile at her Lawrenceville home. Her family says she had a severe allergy to fire ants, and they believe...

In just ten minutes, an ant could learn to identify urine from mice with cancerous tumors, a new study findsScientists want to train insects to test humans for cancer. In a new study, published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, ants could differentiate between the smell of urine from healthy mice and from mice with cancerous tumors. The research serves as a proof of concept demonstrating that ants could someday be used as a fast, inexpensive and noninvasive tool for detecting cancer, the authors write. “This is an exciting direction,” Debajit Saha, a biomedical engineer at Michigan State...

it turns out that zooming in on an ant’s face is an absolute nightmare. A close-up photograph of an ant was sent in as a submission to the 48th annual Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition — and the results are freaky. The tight shot of the tiny insect, captured by Dr. Eugenijus Kavaliauskas of Taurage, Lithuania, shows the ant’s beady red eyes, angry expression and what appears to be long, sharp teeth.

Counting ants is a bit like counting grains of sand on a beach. But six researchers have proved they were up for the task. They’ve come up with the latest—and most comprehensive—estimate of the number of ants in the world: 20 quadrillion. That’s 12 megatons of biomass—more than all the wild birds and mammals taken together. Ants are important ecosystem engineers, moving dirt, distributing seeds, and recycling organic matter. There has been some research to see how ants are distributed around the world, but there was no global estimate of how many there are. So for the work, researchers combed...

How many stars are there in our galaxy? How many grains of sand in the Sahara? How many ants live on Earth? These are all questions that seem impossible to answer. However, through intensive and extensive data analysis, science is coming amazingly close to finding the solutions. When it comes to ants, a team led by Würzburg biologists Sabine Nooten and Patrick Schultheiss has done just that. Schultheiss has been conducting research at the Chair of Behavioral Biology and Sociobiology at Julius Maximilians University (JMU) since 2022. He was drawn to Würzburg from the University of Hong Kong. The publication...

(audio) Scientists say they've figured out at least part of North America's invasive, imported fire ant problem by turning a virus that kills them into a weapon. A group of researchers from Tennessee, Florida and North Carolina universities said in their new study, published in the print edition of the Journal of Invertebrate Pathology this month, that they successfully reduced wild Florida populations of imported fire ants. The ants reduce nearby biodiversity, so the team used a virus called Solenopsis invicta virus 3 to kill them. "Laboratory tests have shown that Solenopsis invicta virus 3 may be an effective natural...

Formica fusca ants can be trained to detect cancerous cells. Paul Devienne, Laboratoire d'Ethologie Expérimentale et Comparée at 'Université Sorbonne Paris Nord ****************************************************************** You've probably heard about dogs that have been trained to smell cancer in humans. But what about ants doing the same job? A team of scientists has found that ants can use their keen sense of smell to detect cancerous cells. The team used Formica fusca ants, also known as silky ants, and trained them through a reward system. "After a few minutes of training, these insects, which use smell for daily tasks, were able to differentiate...

The delivery — due to arrive Monday — is the company's 23rd for NASA in just under a decade. A recycled Falcon rocket blasted into the predawn sky from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. After hoisting the Dragon capsule, the first-stage booster landed upright on SpaceX's newest ocean platform, named "A Shortfall of Gravitas." SpaceX founder Elon Musk continued his tradition of naming the booster-recovery vessels in tribute to the late science fiction writer Iain Banks and his Culture series. The Dragon is carrying more than 4,800 pounds (2,170 kilograms) of supplies and experiments, and fresh food including avocados, lemons and...

It was so good to go to my supermarket this afternoon and see several people with no masks. Finally, we are dispensing with this nonsense. This was in Danbury, CT. Anyway, it's pretty amazing how much weight (relative to their own weight) that little ants can carry. It's just the weirdest thing. When I smash a big ant on my patio, suddenly a bunch of little ants surround it and carry it away. To where, I have no idea. But they are taking it someplace and they evidently have a purpose. They are quite organized. I often wonder what goes...

If you catch 100 red ants and 100 black ants and put them in a jar, at first nothing will happen. But if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa - when the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. So the question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar, and why?

Stranded and left for dead years after falling into a forsaken bunker meant to house nuclear weapons, a colony of ants has apparently resorted to necrotic cannibalism not only to survive, but to thrive. Checking in recently on a colony of Formica polyctena ants that fell into the nether depths of a decrepit, abandoned nuclear weapons storage bunker in rural Poland, a team of researchers led by Prof. Wojciech Czechowski of the Polish Academy of Science found that their numbers hadn’t shrunk at all. In fact, they’d proliferated — even though their entrapment had cut the colony off from any...

There's a better way to get rid of them. This man took matters into his own hands and put fire to what appears to be an ant nest in his backyard. Not surprisingly, this didn't go well. He blew up more than just ants in this DIY-gone-wrong (though luckily no humans—or dogs—were injured). To correctly get rid of those pesky ants, we've got a Popular Mechanics guide. When those irritating little ants start showing up in the house, raiding the kitchen for crumbs and making cozy homes in your walls, the natural reaction is to set an ant trap or...

<p>NEWARK, N.J. (CBS/AP) — A United flight arriving at Newark Liberty International Airport had to be taken out of service after ants from a carry-on bag appeared in part of the cabin. A passenger on the Venice-to-Newark flight Monday described the scenario in a series of tweets and photos.</p>

New research shows that garbage piles produced by leaf-cutter ants emit significant amounts of nitrous oxide—a potent greenhouse gas. Chemical reactions within the organic waste piles produced by leaf-cutter ants create copious amounts of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, according to new research published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. These industrious insects aren’t contributing to global warming on the scale of human activities, but their behaviors are fundamentally altering the composition and function of tropical forests—including the way nutrients are transported and recycled.