Anyone who dismisses ants as just another pesky insect is missing some of nature’s most jaw-dropping displays, including acts of disguise, architectural genius and female domination. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, according to researcher and museum curator Daniel Ksepka, whose new Ants, Tiny Creatures, Big Lives exhibit at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut.
The displays detail the biology and work of some of the 12,000 known species of ants, which he speculates could rise to 20,000 as more are discovered.
Kspeka joins host Robin Young to talk about ants, including the spiny queen, who invades colonies of carpenter ants using a smell disguise, mates with the unsuspecting carpenter ants, and eventually converts their colony to hers.
5 questions with Daniel Ksepka
You say ants run the world. How so?
“They really do. They make our Earth function. So they’re digging their tunnels into the ground and allowing water and air and nutrients to penetrate into the soil. They’re recycling dead organic matter. They’re a food source for thousands and thousands of other species. So, they’re really, really important creatures.”
Can you talk about their architecture?
“I am just amazed by ant architecture. They somehow create these wonderful nests under the ground. When you have hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands of ants in one colony, they can create really large and elaborate nests with all these branching structures. There are chambers for the queen, for the eggs. There are graveyards underground. There are chambers where they grow their food. They basically have agriculture going on down there.”
But your exhibit is largely female ants. Why is that?
“Yes, there’s only one male ant in the entire exhibit, and he’s in a photograph. That’s because in the world, the females, they basically do everything.
“So, the queen is obviously female, but the workers, the soldiers, the ants that are in charge of storing food in their own bodies, the turtle ant, soldiers that block the nest entrances with their own heads. These are all female.
“The males basically only exist to mate. They hatch; they mill about. And then on the nuptial flight, the males are usually winged, they fly off. They hope to mate. If they do, if they don’t, either way, they’re probably dead within a couple of days.
“So, there’s so many different species of ants. There’s probably about 20,000 species out there right now. We haven’t even named all of them yet. And within each species, there’s often this amazing division of labor where different individuals take on different roles.”
What is a thief ant?
“There’s a lot of cases where ants will attack other colonies of their own species, of other species. There are cases where they’ll actually steal the eggs or the pupa or the larva of another and raise them basically to be their servants.”
It’s like ‘War of the Worlds,’ or, as you wrote, ‘Manchurian Candidate,’ when it comes to the spiny queen who goes in masquerading as the carpenter queen. And slowly, over time, all the carpenter ants are bearing her spiny babies until it is a spiny colony. It’s amazing.
“It comes back to the way ants communicate. Smell doesn’t mean that much to humans, but for ants, it’s their main form of communication. So, they use chemical communication. They use pheromones to mark a trail to food, to tell their nest mates where to go to get more food.
“They use it to say, ‘It’s me, let me in,’ to identify themselves to the soldiers, to let them back in the nest. They use it to say, ‘Back off,’ to other ants. And the reason that spiny ant is able to take over is she cloaks herself with that same pheromone as the carpenter queen.
“And so, the workers don’t realize anything’s wrong because she smells right. She seems like their queen, and they accept her, and other species use this, too. There’s beetles that actually trick ants into feeding them by making the right chemical signal.”
At the show that’s coming up at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, people are going to be able to smell what ants smell like.
“So, typically to smell these smells, you either have to anger the ant or squish the ants. We didn’t want to crush up a bunch of ants every day to renew our display stations. We have what we call a smell column. It looks a little bit like the machinery that shuts off the tractor beam in the first ‘Star Wars’ movie.
“So basically, you can smell a scent that’s very similar to what an ant smells like to us. And I say to us because they probably perceive these smells in very different ways. So for example, for the African stink, that gives off a smell that smells kind of like rotten eggs. And it does that to call for help. When they’re trapped in a collapsed tunnel, they basically stink for help. And that encourages their nest mates to come dig them out. And so that smells really bad to us. To an ant, it’s like a siren or an alarm going off.
“The chocolate smell is great. These ants, they have a scent gland in their mandible, and they release this smell that to us, it smells really good, like chocolate. Scientists have done experiments where when they drop a little droplet of it by some fire ants, it will kind of ward them off. And so, this is maybe more like, I don’t know, the equivalent of pepper spray or something.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Karyn Miller-Medzon produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Robin Young. Michael Scotto adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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