Sep 30, 2017
Well, I don't have a lot of pics of ants. I mean, they are so ubiquitous that one never really gets excited and says, "oooh, and ant! Let me get a picture of that!".
As promised, however, I do have a picture of ants tending aphids - which I got while up around Grand Lake Stream in Maine:
More of interest, I think, are the resources I can point you to should you be interested in poking around more.
Here is Holldobler's and Wilson's epic work, the Ants:
Everything you could want to know about ant is in this book. Well, maybe not everything, but darn close.
I have not read this work, but from what I understand Deborah Gordon's work is excellent. I've heard it is an interesting contrast to Wilson's work.
If you live in New England, and really want to get into ants, this is the book to have:
I know there are other books out there for other regions, so poke around - you'll likely be able to find a good reference book for ants in your area.
But mostly I wanted to give you a smattering here of the incredible amount of diversity and volume of ant research that is going on. I record these episode about a month in advance. Here is a list of current ant research that I just happened to come across over the last month:
A great little article about a medical condition, it's link to ants, and the role of indigenous cultures in knowledge:
A really cool article about how ants interact with each other:
an article about discovering 74 new species of ants from Australia. 74!!!
pub_releases/2017-09/pp-
An article about mutualism between plants and ants -
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-09/uot-ssm091817.php
A cool article about a really wierd fossil ant:
A lastly great article about "lazy" ants - kind of an interesting counterbalance to all the anthropomorphic descriptions of ants as industrious:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-09/uoa-lam090817.php
All of this I just came across over the last month. Pretty impressive and interesting.