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Ants may be useful in ways we never imagined. Now a group of researchers from 16 different institutions are collaborating on a project to find out what ants can tell us about genes, environment and aging. Why ants? Studying aging in ants makes sense because the different female castes – the workers (b in figure), soldiers [...] You get to see a lot of surprising things in the Sonoran Desert of the southwestern United States. How cacti provide nectar for ants is just one example. Most of us learned in school that flowers produce nectar, which is then collected by bees, butterflies, bats and/or moths. Extrafloral nectaries are structures on a plant that [...] The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a wonderful photo gallery of ant pictures by Mark Moffett at The Hidden Life of Ants. The photograph of the bulldog ant larvae is just incredible (see communication section).You wouldn’t think a larva with no legs would be able to sit up like that. Hopefully the gallery will [...] Maybe Miss Spider’s eating habits aren’t so out of line after all. In the children’s books, Miss Spider eats only flowers, which in the past seemed unlikely because spiders were all thought to be carnivores. Now scientists have found a vegetarian spider. This spider is sneaky, however, because it eats food provided by plants that [...] |
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