What is this , a lav for ants ? Yes , Derek , it is ! Researchers work with black garden ants reveal that these hard worker form well - defined faecal plot of ground within of their nest – a behaviour that ’s never been documented in ants before . Thefindingswere bring out inPLOS ONEthis week .
Social dirt ball have multiple strategies for dealing with poop and other waste matter . beloved bees perform defecation flight , wanderer mites plunge their BM outside their silk shelters , and some ants make particular waste - storage chambers ( call kitchen muckhill ) . Sometimes , the insect even put the wastefulness to utilise , as twist textile or a justificatory shield – suggesting how feces and refuse may not always be wild waste matter .
In previous work with pismire , Tomer Czaczkes from Universität Regensburghad discover short dark maculation in the corner of their nest . “ I knew what they looked like to me , but you ca n’t just go onward and say , ‘ Well , it ’s dark-brown , it must be a toilet,’”he tells the Los Angeles Times . And it was surprisingly tough to get ants in the act . So , “ we did the experimentation , ” he adds , “ to see what really is go on . ”
His team housed 21 small-scale colony of common black ants , Lasius niger , in plaster nest and provided them with a lolly root that was colour either red or blue so they could see where the ants take a shit . After two months , between one to four well - specify redness or drear patch form within each of the plaster of Paris nests , specially at the corner . The dark patches matched the color of the sugar result they were feed .
To the rightfield you could see the plaster nests that had been inhabited by 150 to 300 worker ants for two months .
These colored patch never contained other permissive waste material , like uneaten food or the corpses of fallen nest - Ilex paraguariensis – these were collected in waste cumulus outside of the nest . That means the biased patch , the source say , are best describe as can .
But why did n’t ants figure out in the sanitation department get rid of the poop along with the other waste ? That ’s still a closed book for now . Although , the presence of toilets within the nest suggests that their excrement probably is n’t riddled with pathogens . It may even have a beneficial role : Maybe the ants are mining the poop for nutrients for larvae , or maybe they ’re using it as plant food for their fungi .
Images : shutterstock.com ( top ) , 2015 Czaczkes et al . ( middle )
