From the soil to the lab – collecting fire ant colonies in Taiwan
In their recently published paper, “A new densovirus from the tropical fire ant with widespread distribution in Taiwan“, authors Chen et al. report the discovery...
Myrmecological News Blog
Cuticular hydrocarbons and colony-level foraging behaviour in desert ants
As climate change accelerates, it becomes more and more important to understand how environmental stress affects physiological traits and behavioural responses. In the paper “Cuticular...
Ant venom: not just formic acid
Formicine ants are famous for producing formic acid, but Lukas Koch and colleagues found that their venom contains much more than previously assumed. In a...
Exploring the injury ecology of ants in Central Europe
The last few years have witnessed amazing advancements in our understanding of how frequently and in what ways ants get injured, and what formidable strategies...
Do nonnative ants change the size-complexity relationships? An interview with Leo Ohyama
The size-complexity hypothesis predicts that the larger an organism, the more complex it becomes, for instance, by producing more types of cells. This holds true...
A canopy architect: Azteca ants restructure arboreal diversity across trees in tropical coffee plantations
In tropical coffee agroforests, a diverse ant community can occur across multiple vertical strata, yet the extent to which dominant species influence these patterns remains...
Ant keepers contribute to the science of colony foundation by parasitic Lasius
In a recent study published in Current Biology, “Socially parasitic ant queens chemically induce queen-matricide in host workers“, Taku Shimada and colleagues reported a new...
A Ring Species Around the Dinaric Alps? An Interview with Sándor Csősz
Biologists are often only able to observe the end result of the process of speciation by studying clearly separated species, and rarely get the chance...
Morphology is not dead!
Recently, research on ants has increasingly focused on molecular approaches. However, there is a need for classic taxonomy, as demonstrated in the following article. A...
Hiding in plain sight: common fungi in red wood ant colonies
Ant colonies can be dense, which may have some hidden costs. Pathogens and parasites find rich pickings in these tightly packed societies, and some have...
Cloning the competition: Jonathan Romiguier on the bizarre world of Messor harvester ants
In a groundbreaking study, “One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants”, Jonathan Romiguier – an evolutionary biologist at the University of...
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