Much like people, insect colonies like to know if her majesty is at home. In the ants, bees, wasps and termites (the “big four” of the social insect world), the queen has long been suspected of using special…
Worker ants are a funny old bunch, of many shapes and sizes. But they tend to get bigger and smaller much more often than evolving entirely new shapes, according to a new study. While most animals juggle…
One of most famous fungi in the world is the “zombie ant fungus”. It takes over the mind of an ant, causing it to climb up a branch and cling to the underside of a leaf before mummification. Once locked…
Ants have been quite successful, evolutionarily speaking. They are found on every continent, apart from Antarctica. They fill a range of ecological niches, from the tops of towering rain forest trees to…
How intelligent are animals? Despite centuries of effort by philosophers, psychologists and biologists, the question remains unanswered. We are inclined to tackle this question using a top-down approach…
Recently we reported on the issue of red imported fire ants in Brisbane – a pernicious pest, first detected in Queensland in 2001, that affects agricultural crops, native species and human health. Although…
Since first being detected in Brisbane, Queensland, in 2001, red imported fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) have shown themselves to be an extremely damaging invasive pest, affecting agricultural crops, native…
When disaster strikes, search and rescue robots could save lives by finding and retrieving people buried under rubble. But designing robots that can descend rapidly through unstable and uneven rubble has…
You’d be hard pressed to find many people who hold ants in high regard. That might be due to their destructive behaviour towards lawns, their ability to infest your house in no time at all, or a willingness…
We humans have long looked to ants as models for our own societies, from Jean de La Fontaine’s tale of the grasshopper and the ant to modern uses of ant algorithms to solve computational and logistics…
Can an ant’s strategy for moving around be useful for building robots with autonomous navigation? Working with experts in the field of artificial intelligence, we have just begun to explore this possibility…