Insect Social Behavior: Farmer Ants Cultivate Fungi and Drama-Prone Wasps Wage Wars

Ants and wasps are among the most diverse and successful insects on Earth, with more than 20,000 and 100,000 species respectively.

They play important roles in ecosystems, such as pollinating plants, dispersing seeds, controlling pests, and providing food for other animals.

These insects also have complex social behaviors, such as cooperation, communication, division of labor, and conflict resolution.

However, ants and wasps are also facing many threats to their survival, such as habitat loss, invasive species, pesticides, pollution, and diseases.

One of the main factors behind the decline of many ant and wasp populations is climate change, which is caused by the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and agriculture.

Contribution of Insects to the Environment

(Photo : JACK TAYLOR/AFP via Getty Images)

Insects play a vital role in ecology, agriculture, human health, and the conservation of natural resources. All terrestrial ecosystems' biological base is provided by insects, as per Wiley Online Library.

They maintain soil structure and fertility, pollinate plants, spread seeds, cycle nutrients, control the populations of other species, and provide a significant food source for other taxa.

Most significant insect pests in agriculture are introduced non-native species that frequently lack their natural biological control mechanisms.

Also Read: Ants: Our Saviors from Climate Change?

Farmer's ants and drama-prone wasps adapting to climate change

Jonathan Shik, from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, said that ants only evolved agriculture through natural selection, independent of human technology or civilization, as per Phys.org.

60 million years of climatic change have not harmed ant populations.

The sustainability of their agricultural systems is in jeopardy even though humans have barely been farming for 10,000 years.

There are numerous types of leafcutter ants, and they all meticulously select leaves from a variety of plant species to gather.

Finding out how ants choose the proper nutrition for their fungi among hundreds of tree species in a rainforest were a crucial component of the study, according to Shik.

Fungi have specific nutritional needs for elements like calcium, phosphorus, and nitrogen. In the field, researchers also gathered samples of the fungal crop from ant burrows for study.

The scientists then put up 150 fake ant colonies in the University of Copenhagen lab, simulating various humidity levels and temperatures in unique climate-controlled chambers.

The scientists created mixtures of nutrients that ants could gather and transport to the artificial nests. The team discovered which nutritional combinations are best for the fungi by examining the fungus harvests that resulted.

According to Shik, when ants in the lab were fed protein-rich diets, they chose not to carry these resources back to the nest rather than letting their fungus garden starve to death.

Another type of bug in Africa is being driven to modify its social structure in response to climatic changes.

Wasps are believed to be forced to hibernate in temperate zones throughout the winter, and once their hibernation is finished, they are more likely to lose contact with their close relatives.

The wasps have little choice but to cooperate with people who may not share their genetic makeup in order to survive and flourish.

English biologist Patrick Kennedy from the University of Bristol in the U.K. has been working on a project called WaspCLIM, which has been studying the social behavior of a species of African wasp that can be found in a variety of environmental settings.

The researchers used various color schemes to designate hundreds of wasps in the field.

The left wing was marked with one to three dots as a code for a particular nest, while the right wing was marked with a mark to designate a certain person.

When everything was ready, the researchers gave the wasps the choice of cooperating or not. That required either creating their own nest or taking on a subordinate role in another one, all while their actions were being observed by research cameras.