Tag Archives: Ant

“Like Finding a Diamond”: 16-Million-Year-Old Fossil of Elusive Ant Stuns Scientists  SciTechDaily Source link

In ant colonies, caste means everything. A queen grows wings, lays eggs, and lives a life of reproduction. A worker stays wingless, handles all the labor, and rarely reproduces. But how do ants end up with such different fates when they all start out the same? For a long time, scientists knew that both genes and the environment played a …

A first-of-its-kind study traces the rise of ant- and termite-eaters, revealing how mammals returned to the evolutionary table — at least a dozen times — to hone traits for feasting on the social insect bonanza that exploded after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Mammals have developed some unusual eating habits over the past 100 million years, but a new study …