Biologists antagonised ants and found out they can hold grudges
January 12, 2025 Imma Perfetto
Previous research has shown that ant colonies are more likely to behave aggressively towards neighbouring colonies, but less likely to do so against unfamiliar ones.
It’s known as the “nasty neighbour effect” and, until now, researchers weren’t sure why it exists.
A new Current Biology study has discovered that ants remember the smell of their enemies.
“We often have the idea that insects function like pre-programmed robots,” says Volker Nehring from the University of Freiburg, Germany.
“Our study provides new evidence that, on the contrary, ants also learn from their experiences and can hold a grudge.”
The researchers pitted colonies of the black garden ant, Lasius niger, against each other. In the first phase of the experiment, they were exposed either exposed to nestmates or to ants from a different colony.
Each meeting lasted for one minute and was repeated once per day for 5 consecutive days. Ants’ aggression when encountering non-nestmates increased significantly during this training phase.
On day 6, the team found that ants acted most aggressively when encountering the non-nestmate colony they had previously fought but were less aggressive towards ants from a non-nestmate colony they hadn’t yet encountered. Unsurprisingly, they weren’t aggressive towards their own nestmates.
In the second phase of the experiment, encounters were repeated with either aggressive or passive ants from a different colony. They found the ants that had previously only encountered passive competitors behaved significantly less aggressively.
Because ants use odours to distinguish between members of their own nest and those from other nests, the study suggests that ants learned to associate aggression with the non-nestmate colony’s specific scent.
Nehring and his team now plan to investigate whether and to what extent ants adapt their olfactory receptors to their experiences.
Originally published by Cosmos as Biologists antagonised ants and found out they can hold grudges
August 19, 2024 Imma Perfetto
Scientists have compiled a library of hailstones to help fine-tune hailstorm simulations and make weather forecasts more accurate.
To make calculations more simple, conventional scientific hailstorm modelling assumes all hailstones are perfectly spherical. In reality, they’re a little more complicated than that.
“Hail can be all sorts of weird shapes, from oblong to a flat disc or have spikes coming out – no two pieces of hail are the same,” says Dr Joshua Soderholm, honorary senior research fellow at University of Queensland and research scientist at the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia.
In their new study in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Soderholm and collaborators explored whether compiling a reference library of non-spherical, natural hail shapes could change the outcomes of hailstorm modelling.
“Our study used data from 217 hail samples, which were 3-D scanned and then sliced in half, to tell us more about how the hailstone formed,” says Soderholm.
“This is effectively a dataset to represent the many and varied shapes of hailstones.”
According to lead researcher Yuzhu Lin, a PhD candidate at Pennsylvania State University in the US, the differences were dramatic.
“Modelling of the more naturally shaped hail showed it took different pathways through the storm, experienced different growth and landed in different places,” she says.
“It also affected the speed and impact the hail had on the ground. This way of modelling had never been done before, so it’s exciting science.”
While the modelling is currently only used by scientists studying storms, Soderholm says the end game is to be able to predict how big hail will be and where it will fall in real-time.
“More accurate forecasts would of course warn the public so they can stay safe during hailstorms and mitigate damage,” he says.
“But it could also significantly benefit industries such as insurance, agriculture and solar farming which are all sensitive to hail.”
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