Volume 41, Number 1, January 1995:
Collection and Maintenance of Ants
and
Studying Ants: A Beginning
by Mark B. DuBois

Text-only version

ISSUE HOME PAGE

ABOUT THIS ISSUE
- about KSN
- about the author

IN THIS ISSUE
- introduction
- collection
- maintenance, observation ant farm
- maintenance, classroom use
- project observations
- literature cited
- books for children on ants

Studying Ants: A Beginning
by Mark B. DuBois
- males, queens and worker ants
- establishing a colony
- caring for young
- growth of an ant colony
- ant senses
- gardening ants
- harvester ants
- parasitic ants
- acrobat ants
- army ants
- questions, activities and investigations with ants
- further reading

SLIDESHOW
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Collection and Maintenance of Ants to Use for Teaching
by Roger D. Akre, Laurel D. Hansen, and Elizabeth A. Myhre

and

Studying Ants: A Beginning
by Mark B. DuBois

MALES, QUEENS AND WORKER ANTS

Most ants you encounter are sterile females called workers. In Kansas, most colonies contain a single reproductive female - the queen. She is typically larger than works and has a modified thorax which contains flight muscles. I find queens of the carpenter ants (genus Camponotus) quite impressive. They are often longer than one inch and can often be found under loose bark in late summer and autumn. When you look at them with a magnifying lens, you can locate their wing scars. These large ants have a strong bite but they don't sting. Male ants exist for the sole purpose of inseminating the queen. Once finished, most die within a few days. Typical colonies contain several thousand workers and one or several queens.

The gender of an ant is determined based on whether it is fertilized: fertilized eggs develop into females and unfertilized eggs grow to become males. If a developing female receives abundant food and the proper chemical cues, she develops into a queen; most females merely become sterile workers. Ants contain the widest range of chromosome numbers found in the animal kingdom: from n=1 to n=59! Since male ants are haploid, the entire ant [in the case of the n=1 species found in Australia, Myrmecia pilosula] is defined by just one chromosome in each cell nucleus.