When Bringing Back the Mangoes, Ants Specialize for the Job

Editor's note: An article in the New York Times titled “When Bringing Back the Mangoes, Ants Specialize for the Job” details how the leaf-cutter ant, like other things in nature, has a way of optimizing its teams. Here is an excerpt.

To have a good football team, you’ve got to match the players to the positions. Your linemen must be big and beefy, your receivers lean and lithe. Anything less optimal and you’re headed for disaster. Nature has a way of optimizing its teams, too. Leaf-cutter ants, for example, come in a wide range of sizes, and those of different size have different jobs. The largest defend the colony, the mid-size ants do the leaf-cutting and carrying, and the smallest tend to the fungus that grows among the decaying leaf pieces inside the colony.

But leaf-cutters cut more than leaves; they slice and dice mangoes and other fruit that falls to the forest floor. The largest ants do some of the fruit cutting, but this would not seem to be the optimal situation. Since fruit is soft and smaller, weaker ants can cut it just as well.

After studying the fruit-cutting habits of leaf-cutters, Heikki Helantera of the University of Helsinki and Francis L. W. Ratnieks of the University of Sussex in England suggest why larger ants are involved. It all has to do with geometry, they report in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Click here to read the entire article.

Source: New York Times