Why Do Ants Run In Circles?

What is the death spiral in ants?

What Is The ‘Death Spiral’? Army ants are blind, but they can find food and move freely by following each other’s scent. A ‘death spiral’ is a strange natural phenomenon in which a colony of ants essentially commits suicide by following each other in an endless circle until they die of exhaustion.

Do ants move in circles?

The Army ants can be seen moving in ‘circular death trap’. – A video of a colony of Army ants going around in circles is gaining traction on Twitter and users are both fascinated and confused. Ants are busy creatures who are known for their discipline.

• Whenever we see a colony of ants, they always work in a group and walk in an organised format from their food to their colonies.
• Not just food, ants also work hard and carry weights that are up to 20 times their own bodyweight.
• They work around a queen and are so impressive and efficient at their work.

But the video that we are talking about shows ants moving in a “circular death trap” and achieving nothing. While some ants can be seen lying dead, others on the outer borders can be seen moving out and going back in to move in circles. Twitter account ‘Bitcoin’ posted the video of army ants with the caption, “Army ants are blind and rely on pheromones to track the ones in front.

If one ant intersects with its old trail then it results in a circular death trap where they spiral until they die from exhaustion. However, the contrarian army ants might survive.” With more than 1 lakh views, 1,277 likes and 318 retweets, the video has garnered a lot of attention. Army ants are blind and rely on pheromones to track the ones in front.

If one ant intersects with its old trail then it results in a circular death trap where they spiral until they die from exhaustion.However, the contrarian army ants might survive. pic.twitter.com/ruQhtGUei9 — Bitcoin (@Bitcoin) April 12, 2022 Many of the users were simply amazed with the video, and wondered how they walked in a death trap.

• ScienceDirect explains this phenomenon saying that Army ants are practically blind and use pheromones to mark their paths or follow other ants to trace their path.
• While this system might sound extremely efficient, sometimes a few ants tend to retrace their paths a few times.
• This causes all the ants to be stuck in a loop.

This in turn leads to a death trap where the ants keep moving in a loop until exhaustion and eventually die. Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and IPL 2022 Live Updates here. A team of writers at News18.com bring you stories on what’s creating the buzz on the Internet while exploring science, cricket, tech, gender, Bollywoo,

Why do ants carry dead ants?

Do ants bury their dead? Rolf Nussbaumer Photography/Alamy I left an empty plastic laundry basket on the lawn. Later, ants dropped dead companions into it. Where do ants bury their dead? Mike Follows, Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, UK This behaviour is called necrophoresis.

• It is common among social insects like bees, termites and ants, which need to remove corpses to prevent the spread of pathogens.
• Ant colonies have specialised undertakers for the task.
• They usually carry their dead to a sort of graveyard or take them to a dedicated tomb within the nest.
• Some ants bury their dead.

This strategy is also adopted by termites forming a new colony when they can’t afford the luxury of corpse carriers. Like other insects, the corpse carriers among the common red ant ( Myrmica rubra ) aren’t issued with personal protective equipment. They cannot even wash their hands.

1. However, they do practise a form of social distancing in order to limit cross-contamination by staying outside the nest most of the time or congregating near the entrance when resting inside.
2. This cooperative behaviour goes a step further with the Matabele ant ( Megaponera analis ).
3. These ants send out raiding parties to attack colonies of termites on which they prey.

Ants that lose only one or two limbs in an attack are evacuated back to their nest where their injuries are tended to until they can literally get up to speed again, adapting their locomotion, ready for the next foray. To answer this question – or ask a new one – email,

New Scientist Ltd retains total editorial control over the published content and reserves all rights to reuse question and answer material that has been submitted by readers in any medium or in any format. You can also submit answers by post to: The Last Word, New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES.,

Topics: : Do ants bury their dead?

Are ants intelligent?

Ants are considered one of the smartest insects. Bees are generally ranked smarter, though, and have shown the ability to observe, learn, and demonstrate the memory needed to problem solve. Their ability to navigate a wildly divergent field of flowers helps to illustrate this.

How do ants know they are dead?

On the Death Rituals of Ants This is something that I think is absolutely fascinating and I’ve been hoarding for YEARS to go into, Now that I’m actually writing the book, there isn’t a place for it. One has to kill their darlings and whatnot. So I’m going to share it now.

1. To the naked eye, ants deal with their dead much like humans.
2. When a member of the colony dies, the carcass will lie where it fell for a period of roughly two days.
3. In the fashion of a wake, this time period presumably gives the other ants time to pay their respects to their fallen comrade.
4. After two days, the living ants take the dead ant to an ant graveyard in a respectful procession, honoring the good work it performed for the colony.

Well, not quite. The carcass does lie there for two days and it is carted off to a pile of dead ants. But this isn’t done out of social obligations or as a healing ritual to soften the loss. As Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson discovered, in reality, the dead ant must lay there for two days because the other ants simply don’t realize it is dead.

• Two days after death, the tiny ant corpse begins emitting a chemical called oleic acid.
• To an ant, the smell of oleic acid equals death.
• The experience of death is not a sense of loss, not a dead body, not an ascent to ant afterlife- it is simply oleic acid.
• As soon as the living ants smell the oleic acid smell, they spring into action, carrying the tiny decaying intruder out of their midst and dumping it into the pile.

Even more interesting, Wilson discovered that if you give a live ant a bath in oleic acid, it is as good as dead to the other ants. The still alive (but oleic acid covered) ant is carried off to the dead ant pile, trying to clean itself, flailing around, perhaps screaming “um, hey guys, I’m fine,” to no avail.

Do ants mourn their dead?

Do ants have graveyards? – That being said, ants do have graveyards. Though these look very different from what we consider graveyards, underground cemeteries or dumps are used to move the deceased away from the nest. Middens are the place where dead ants are laid to rest, though there is no ceremony or fanfare.

Do ants feel pain?

Do Ants Feel Pain? – Ants are not subjected to feeling the same pain humans do. They can recognize damage and respond to it, but they don’t genuinely feel pain the same way people do due to nociception, according to Animalpolis, Nociception refers to a signal that enters the central nervous system due to the stimulation of specialized sensory receptors in the peripheral nervous system known as nociceptors.

It is the neurological process of encoding and processing unpleasant stimuli, per Physiopedia, Nociception is the physiological mechanism through which bodily tissues are protected from harm. Potentially harmful stimuli activate nociceptors. The body’s “fight or flight response” and defense against damage from our surroundings depend on nociception.

Nociceptors can be activated by three different types of stimuli present in the target tissue – thermal, mechanical, and chemical. As a result, each of these three groups can be used to classify unpleasant stimuli. Because one can exist without the other, nociception and pain shouldn’t be used interchangeably.

How long do ants sleep?

2. Ants Get Their Sleep Through Power Naps – You might be wondering, do ants sleep ? If you’ve ever observed ants at different times of the day, or even at night, they always seem to be active. But that’s because ants take incredibly short power naps and at staggered times—meaning there are always ants that are awake when others are taking their quick rest.

Why do ants exist?

Ecological Importance

Ants play an important role in the environment.Ants turn and aerate the soil, allowing water and oxygen to reach plant roots. Ants take seeds down into their tunnel to eat the nutritious elaiosomes that are part of the seed. These seeds often sprout and grow new plants (seed dispersal). Ants eat a wide variety of organic material and provide food for many different organisms.Click the image below to learn more about the ant’s role in the food web.

: Ecological Importance

What do ants hate?

Ant infestations are such a pain, from destroying your favourite plants to working their way into your home. I’ve spent years trying to find the best solution which is also safe, toxic free and effective. Studying aromatherapy and realising the power of essential oils has opened up a world of natural preventative medicine for everyday life but also for my garden and home. It might seem easy to purchase any old ant repellent however most on the market are full of chemicals which are detrimental to the environment. Free of nasty chemicals and distilled by hand in our workshop in Norfolk, our Ant repellent tonic uses the active principle of the refreshing Mentha Herb essential oil. Ants absolutely hate the smell of mint, they will go to great lengths to avoid it which is why it works wonders. I have mint plants around the threshold of my home or you can put 1 or 2 drops of peppermint oil wherever they enter. You can also create a mobile barrier with a peppermint plant in a pot which can be placed wherever you need it.

Alternatively I’ll grab some peppermint leaves from my herb garden, chop them up and scatter them where they are needed. To clear a nest you can use x2 drops of neat peppermint oil directly onto the nest and wait for a mass exodus. Peppermint is such a useful plant or oil to have for deterring pests, it even works brilliantly to deter rats and mice.

Essential oil tea for the garden: Add 8 drops of essential oil to 600ml water, boil and leave to cool. Use 2 tablespoons to 4 litres of water in the usual watering methods. Peppermint, Spearmint, Pennyroyal, Garlic and Citronella are effective essential oils ants hate. You can also put the essential oil on a cotton-wool ball and place them by the doors.

Spray the essential oil along shelves and floors where the ants are seen, and on their nests. Or, grow plants ants hate. Grow the plants near the doors of the house either in the ground or in pots. Choose from; Spearmint, tansy, pennyroyal or peppermint for the most effective. I do hope this helps you to think about a more natural way for repelling ants.

I would love to hear if you have any other suggestions that work for you, or if you have already tried any of these methods. Talk soon, Bella x

Do ants smell bad when you squish them?

While that may not be much when you just crush one ant, but if you crush a lot of them, the smell can be quite potent and be hard to get rid of around the house.

Should I clean up dead ants?

Should You Clean Up Dead Ants? – If you have killed or discovered dead ants near the foundations of your house, or precisely in your home, you should wait before trying to clean them up. As mentioned earlier, dead ants release a pheromone chemical that is supposed to alarm the colony.

As soon as other ants detect this smell, they get out of their hiding place to come and collect the dead body. This takes about two days. Therefore, if you leave the dead ant on the floor for two days, you will see the ants come to collect the carcass. If you watch the ants for these two days, you will notice or know where their nest is located.

After that, you can find a way to get rid of the nest or kill the ants in the colony. Therefore, you should not clean up the dead ants so that you can identify their nest. Have you noticed an indoor ant nest? Tracking or trailing to a nest in your home is very crucial.

Their presence in your home means food and water contamination as well as structural damage. To track down the nest, look for a pile of ants’ carcasses near windows, door edges, and other openings. Look around pipes because ants need water, or parts of your house or structures in your home that are made from wood.

When you track the nest, treat that area with insecticides specifically designed to kill ants. Looking for ant removal service near you? Our dedicated team at Peachtree Pest Control provides the most effective solution to eliminate your ant problem. So call us today to get your free estimate on fast and reliable ant pest control in Metro Atlanta.

Can ants hear humans talk?

Fact #3: Ants don’t have ears. – Instead of hearing through auditory canals, ants “hear” by feeling vibrations in the ground. Special sensors on their feet and on their knees help ants interpret signals from their surroundings. They also use their antennae and the hairs on their body to feel around while foraging for food.

Are ants loyal to humans?

The Ants Go Marching to War – Ants are very loyal to their own colony, but they can be quite nasty toward outsiders. Competition among colonies for food and other resources often leads to aggression. Many species establish a territory around their nest that is off-limits to neighboring ants.

What smell do ants hate?

What smells do ants hate? – Ants are fascinating and essential creatures for the healthy running of the planet. Depending on the species, they can help enrich the soil, control pests and provide food for many different kinds of wildlife.

Smell	Effect on Ants
Peppermint	Repels ants and disrupts their scent trails
Lemon	The strong citrus scent deters ants
Cinnamon	Cinnamon acts as a natural ant repellent
Vinegar	The strong smell of vinegar repels ants
Eucalyptus	Eucalyptus oil or leaves can deter ants

Table 1: Smells that Repel Ants However, it’s also true that there are places we would prefer ants didn’t go, such as in our houses. Chemical methods of control aren’t very good for the planet, and certainly aren’t very nice for ants. However, the good news is that many plant species have spent millions of years perfecting chemical warfare to ward off harmful or annoying insects.

Smell	Application Methods
Peppermint	Place peppermint oil-soaked cotton balls near ant entry points
Lemon	Use lemon essential oil or fresh lemon peels in affected areas
Cinnamon	Sprinkle cinnamon powder or use cinnamon essential oil
Vinegar	Create a vinegar solution and spray it along ant trails and entry points
Eucalyptus	Apply eucalyptus oil on cotton balls near ant-infested areas

Table 2: Natural Remedies to Repel Ants Therefore, these natural insect repellents can be repurposed to suit our needs, to keep ants away from our homes, and avoid needlessly killing these fascinating insects. Here are a few firm favourites

Why do ants fight each other?

Ants fight for many reasons. They may be protecting their nest or food storage from enemies, or they may fight to try to take over the nest and food source of other ants. Ants do not just fight different species of ants. They will also fight their own species when necessary.

Are ants blind?

Head – Bull ant showing the powerful mandibles and the relatively large compound eyes that provide excellent vision Ant head An ant’s head contains many sensory organs, Like most insects, ants have compound eyes made from numerous tiny lenses attached together. Ant eyes are good for acute movement detection, but do not offer a high resolution image. They also have three small ocelli (simple eyes) on the top of the head that detect light levels and polarization,

1. Compared to vertebrates, ants tend to have blurrier eyesight, particularly in smaller species, and a few subterranean taxa are completely blind,
2. However, some ants, such as Australia’s bulldog ant, have excellent vision and are capable of discriminating the distance and size of objects moving nearly a meter away.

Two antennae (“feelers”) are attached to the head; these organs detect chemicals, air currents, and vibrations ; they also are used to transmit and receive signals through touch. The head has two strong jaws, the mandibles, used to carry food, manipulate objects, construct nests, and for defence.

Do ants care if another ant dies?

July 29, 2022 – Even though it is annoying to see ants getting in your homes or relaxing in your garden’s backyard, ants do help the environment. If you have ants in your home, it is sure you made attempts to squash/kill them. Have you ever noticed a few hours after doing so, other ants begin to swarm around their dead comrades’ bodies? So what is it about dead ants that attract more ants? There is a compelling scientific reason behind an ant’s attraction to a dead ant.

Why does killing ants attract more?

Big Black Ants FAQ – What Are Big Black Ants? Big black ants are likely black carpenter ants, one of the largest ant species in North America. These voracious and destructive insects are known to burrow into homes, decayed wood, and other wooden structures to build nests.

Does Killing Ants Attract More Ants? Yes, killing ants causes their bodies to release oleic acid, known as a “death pheromone.” This chemical alerts other ants of danger, leading them to inspect the area. How Long Do Bait Traps Take to Kill Ants? The bait within common bait traps is specially formulated for a slow release, allowing the ants plenty of time to return to the nest and spread the bait to other colony members, even the queen.

Within 24–48 hours, affected ants will begin to die off. : What Are Those Big Black Ants? Why Are They in My Home?

Do ants get depressed?

For decades, the idea that insects have feelings was considered a heretical joke – but as the evidence piles up, scientists are rapidly reconsidering. O One balmy autumn day in 2014, David Reynolds stood up to speak at an important meeting. It was taking place in Chicago City Hall – a venue so grand, it’s embellished with marble stairways, 75ft (23m) classical columns, and vaulted ceilings.

1. As the person in charge of pest management in the city’s public buildings, among other things, Reynolds was there to discuss his annual budget.
2. But soon after he began, an imposter appeared on one of the walls – a plump cockroach, with her glistening black body contrasting impressively with the white paint.

As she brazenly sauntered along, it was as if she was mocking him. “Commissioner, what is your annual budget for cockroach abatement?” one councillor interrupted, according to a report in The Chicago Tribune, Cue raucous laughter and a mad scramble to eradicate the six-legged prankster.

• No one would question the cockroach’s impeccable, though accidental, comic timing.
• But the incident is partly funny because we think of insects as robotic, with barely more emotional depth than lumps of rock.
• A cockroach that’s capable of being amused or playful – well, that’s just plain absurd.
• Or is it? In fact, there’s mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of feelings.

They can be literally buzzing with delight at pleasant surprises, or sink into depression when bad things happen that are out of their control, They can be optimistic, cynical, or frightened, and respond to pain just like any mammal would. And though no one has yet identified a nostalgic mosquito, mortified ant, or sardonic cockroach, the apparent complexity of their feelings is growing every year.

When Scott Waddell, professor of neurobiology at the University of Oxford, first started working on emotions in fruit flies, he had a favourite running joke – “that, you know, I wasn’t intending on studying ambition”, he says. Fast-forward to today, and the concept of go-getting insects is not so outrageous as it once was.

Waddell points out that some research has found that fruit flies do pay attention to what their peers are doing, and are able to learn from them, Meanwhile, the UK government recently recognised that their close evolutionary cousins – crabs and lobsters – as sentient, and proposed legislation that would ban people from boiling them alive. For insects, golden tortoise beetles are unusually good at making their feelings clear (Credit: Alamy) An evolutionary imperative Insects are a jumbled group of six-legged invertebrate creatures with segmented bodies. There are more than a million different types, encompassing dragonflies, moths, weevils, bees, crickets, silverfish, praying mantis, mayflies, butterflies, and even head lice.

The earliest insects emerged at least 400 million years ago, long before dinosaurs took their first tentative plods. It’s thought our last common ancestor with them was a slug-like creature which lived around 200 million years before that, and they’ve been diversifying ever since. Initially they ruled over the land as giants – some dragonflies were sparrowhawk-sized, with 2.3ft (70cm) wingspans – before evolving into the extraordinary array of arthropods around today, from flies with fake scorpion tails to fuzzy moths that resemble winged poodles,

As a result, they’re strikingly similar to other animals, and yet vividly different. Insects have many of the same organs as humans – with hearts, brains, intestines and ovaries or testicles – but lack lungs and stomachs. And instead of being hooked up to a network of blood vessels, the contents of their bodies float in a kind of soup, which delivers food and carries away waste.

1. The whole lot is then encased in a hard shell, the exoskeleton, which is made of chitin, the same material fungi use to build their bodies.
2. The architecture of their brains follows a similar pattern.
3. Insects don’t have the exact same brain regions as vertebrates, but they do have areas that perform similar functions.

For example, most learning and memory in insects relies on “mushroom bodies” – domed brain regions which have been compared to the cortex, the folded outer layer that’s largely responsible for human intelligence, including thought and consciousness.

Tantalisingly, even insect larvae have mushroom bodies, and some of the neurons within them remain for their whole lives – so it’s been suggested that adult insects that went through this stage might be able to remember some things that happened before they metamorphosed.) There’s mounting evidence that our parallel neural setups power a number of shared cognitive abilities, too.

Bees can count up to four, Cockroaches have rich social lives, and form tribes that stick together and communicate. Ants can even pioneer new tools – they can select suitable objects from their environment and apply them to a task they’re trying to complete, like using sponges to carry honey back to their nest,

Do animals suffer from post-traumatic stress? Why so many of us are casual spider-murderers The intelligent monster you should let eat you

However, though insect brains have evolved down an uncannily familiar path to our own, there is one crucial difference: while human ones are so engorged they sap 20% of our energy and drove women to evolve wider hips, insects have compacted their wits into packages several million times smaller – fruit flies have brains the size of a poppy seed, Asian honeybees scream with their bodies, by vibrating them (Credit: Alamy) So, even at first glance, it seems like insects would have the intellectual capacity for emotions. But does it make sense that they would have evolved them? Emotions are mental sensations that are usually linked to an animal’s circumstances – they’re a kind of mental programme that, when it’s set off, can change the way we act.

It’s thought that different emotions have emerged at different points in evolutionary history, but broadly they turned up to encourage us to behave in ways that will improve our ability to survive or reproduce, and ultimately, maximise our genetic legacy. Geraldine Wright, a professor of entomology at the University of Oxford, gives the example of hunger, which is a state of mind that helps you to alter your decision-making in a way that’s appropriate, such as prioritising food-seeking behaviours.

Other emotions can be equally motivating – rumblings of anger can focus our efforts on rectifying injustices, and constantly chasing happiness and contentment nudges us towards achievements that keep us alive. All these things could also apply to insects.

An earwig that’s thrilled when it finds a nice damp crevice filled with delectable rotting vegetation will be less likely to starve or dry out, just as one that panics and plays dead when it’s disturbed has a better chance of escaping the jaws of a predator. “Let’s say you’re a bee that ends up in a spider web, and a spider is swiftly coming towards your across the web,” says Lars Chittka, who leads a research group that studies bee cognition at Queen Mary, University of London.

“It’s not impossible that the escape responses are all triggered without any kind of emotions. But on the other hand, I find it hard to believe that this would happen without some form of fear,” he says. A heretical idea When Waddell first started his own research group in 2001, he had a fairly simple goal in mind. It’s difficult to study pain in fruit flies because they don’t respond to morphine. However, they are partial to cocaine (Credit: Alamy) To begin with, Waddell cautiously chose the word “motivation”, rather than “hunger”, to describe the flies’ state of mind – he suggested that they were more motivated to find food if it had been withheld.

And people found it a little problematic,” says Waddell. Some other scientists felt that this was too anthropomorphic and preferred the term “internal states”. “So I often had arguments that I thought were essentially meaningless, because they were just playing with that word,” he says. Then in a matter of years, studying insect intelligence became significantly more fashionable – and all of a sudden the term “motivation” was abandoned, with researchers making the case for insects having “emotional primitives”, says Waddell.

In other words, they experienced what looked suspiciously like emotions. “I had always thought of these physiological changes that occur when animals are in deprivation states – deprived of sex, deprived of food – as subjective feelings of ‘hunger’ and ‘sex drive’,” says Waddell.

“I’ve never really bothered labelling them as ’emotions’, pretty much because I thought it was going to get me into trouble. But before I knew it, everyone seemed to be more comfortable using that,” Now that the suggestion insects have feelings is slightly less scandalous, the field has exploded in popularity – and this strange group of animals is becoming more relatable by the day.

But proving that an insect can experience an emotion remains tricky. Take the humble bumblebee. In humans, those who have experienced trauma are especially wired to expect the worst – and this has also been demonstrated in a number of other vertebrate animals, including rats, sheep, dogs, cows, cod and starlings. Cockroaches are highly sociable and copy the behaviour of their peers, just like humans do (Credit: Alamy) First, the researchers trained a troupe of bees to associate one kind of smell with a sugary reward, and another with an unpleasant liquid spiked with quinine, the chemical that gives tonic water its bitter taste.

Then the scientists divided their bee participants into two groups. One was vigorously shaken – a sensation bees hate, though it’s not actually harmful – to simulate an attack by a predator. The other bee crowd was just left to enjoy their sugary drink. To find out if these experiences had affected the bees’ mood, next Wright exposed them to brand new, ambiguous smells.

Those who had had a lovely day usually extended their mouthparts in expectation of receiving another snack, suggesting that they were expecting more of the same. But the bees who had been annoyed were less likely to react this way – they had become cynical.

Intriguingly, the experiment also hinted that the bees weren’t experiencing some alien, unrelatable form of pessimism, but a feeling that might not be too dissimilar to our own. Just like humans who are feeling exasperated, their brains had lower levels of dopamine and serotonin. (They also had lower levels of the insect hormone octopamine, which is thought to be involved in reward pathways.) Wright says many of the chemicals in our brains are highly conserved – they were invented hundreds of millions of years ago.

So an insect’s emotional experiences could be more familiar than you would think. “So from that perspective, yes, they may have diverged a little bit in terms of what they signal in which animal lineage, but it’s quite interesting,” she says. For example, Waddell’s research on fruit flies has found that their brains use dopamine just like ours do, to elicit feelings of reward and punishment.

So it’s very, very interesting that those things have, you know, convergently evolved and are sort of similar,” says Wright. “It means that that’s the best way of doing it.” Wright explains that her bee experiment doesn’t necessarily mean that all insects can experience pessimism or optimism, because bees are unusually social – community life at the hive is particularly cognitively demanding, so they’re considered intelligent for insects.

“But other insects probably do too,” she says. A clear message However, it would be surprising if insects could feel emotions but not express them at all. And tantalisingly, there are some hints that insects might be more relatable than you’d think here too. Industrial farming has turned much of the earth’s surface into a hostile environment for insects (Credit: Alamy) The problem is something Charles Darwin first considered in the late 19th Century. When he wasn’t pondering evolution or eating the “strange flesh” of the exotic fauna he discovered, he spent much of his time thinking about how animals communicate their feelings, and wrote up his findings in a little-known book.

1. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin argues that – just like every other characteristic – the ways humans express their feelings would hardly have appeared out of nowhere in our own species.
2. Instead, our facial expressions, actions and noises are likely to have evolved via a gradual process over millennia.

Crucially, this means that there’s probably some continuity among animals, in terms of the ways that we display our emotional state to others. For example, Darwin noted that animals often make loud noises when they’re excited. Among the loud chattering of storks and the threatening rattling of some snakes, he cites the “stridulations”, or loud vibrations, of many insects, which they make when they’re sexually aroused.

1. Darwin also observed that bees change their hums when they’re cross.
2. This all suggests that you don’t need to have a voice box to express how you’re feeling.
3. Take the golden tortoise beetle, which looks like a miniature tortoise that’s been dipped in molten gold.
4. It’s not actually covered in the element, but instead achieves its glamorous look by reflecting light off fluid-filled grooves embedded in its shell.

However, pick one of these living jewels up – or stress it out in any way – and it will transform before your eyes, flushing ruby-red until it resembles a large iridescent ladybird. Most research on the beetle has focused on the physics of how it achieves the colour switch, but intriguingly, it’s thought that the response is controlled by the insect, which may choose to change depending on what’s going on around it – rather than something that just happens passively. Insects have diversified to fill almost every conceivable niche, but they all share similar brains – so emotions in insects may be universal (Credit: Alamy) Then there’s the Asian honey bee. Around October each year – during what’s ominously referred to as the “slaughter phase” – they run the gauntlet of gangs of bee-decapitating giant hornets, also aptly known as “murder hornets”.

The wasps have a wide native range in Asia, from India to Japan, but scientists suspect they’re slowly invading other areas, with occasional sightings in North America, Their raids on bee hives can last for hours, and wipe out entire colonies – first, they cut up their worker bee victims into pieces, then they go for their offspring.

But the bees don’t go quietly. In work released earlier this year, scientists revealed that they scream – using an amplified, frantic version of their usual buzz. And though no one has conclusively tied the shrieks to an emotional response in the bees, the study’s authors noted in their paper that these “antipredator pipes” share similar acoustic features to the alarm calls of many other animals, from primates to birds to meercats, and might suggest that they’re fearful.

A n uncomfortable truth However, the most contentious aspect of the inner lives of insects has to be pain. “There’s lots of evidence in fruit fly larvae that they feel mechanical pain – if we pinch them, they try to escape – and the same is the case for adult flies as well,” says Greg Neely, a professor of functional genomics at the University of Sydney.

As always, proving that these unpleasant experiences are interpreted as emotional pain is another matter. “The issue is really the higher order aspect,” says Neely. However, there’s emerging evidence that they can indeed feel pain as we know it – and not only that, they can experience it chronically, just like humans.

• One basic clue to the former is that, if you train fruit flies to associate a certain smell with something unpleasant, they will simply run away whenever you present them with it.
• They link together the sensory context with the negative stimulus, and they don’t want that – and so they go away from it,” says Neely.

When fruit flies are prevented from escaping, they eventually give up and exhibit helpless behaviour that looks a lot like depression. But perhaps the most surprising results have emerged from Neely’s own research, which has found that injured fruit flies can experience lingering pain, long after their physical wounds have healed. Insect populations are declining accross the whole planet (Credit: Alamy) And though pain hasn’t yet been studied in a wide variety of insects, Neely thinks its likely that it would be similar across the board. “If we look at the overall architecture of how the brain is set up – the receptors, the ion channels and the neurotransmitters are all pretty similar,” says Neely, who points out that you can find examples of insects that are blind to these sensory signals, such as larvae that are in the middle of their transition to adulthood, but this is unusual.

A question of numbers All this research has some unsettling implications. At the moment, insects are among the most persecuted animals on the planet, routinely killed in almost-incomprehensibly large numbers. This includes 3.5 quadrillion – 3,500,000,000,000,000 – poisoned by insecticides on US farmland each year, two trillion squashed or slammed by cars on Dutch roads, and many more that have gone uncounted.

But though there isn’t much data on the full extent of our insecticide, one thing is widely accepted – the numbers we’re despatching are so vast, we’re living through an “insect Armageddon”, an era where insects are vanishing from the wild at an alarming rate. During “slaughter season” gangs of giant Asian hornets launch ferocious attacks on honeybees, decapitating the adults and eating their offspring (Credit: Alamy) The discovery of insect emotions also poses a slightly awkward dilemma for researchers – especially those who have devoted their careers to uncovering them.

• Fruit flies are the archetypal research animal, studied so intensively that researchers know more about them than almost any other.
• At the time of writing, there are around 762,000 scientific papers that mention its Latin name, ” Drosophila melanogaster “, on Google scholar.
• Equally, studies into bees are growing in popularity, for the insights they can provide into everything from epigenetics – the study of how the environment can influence the way our genes are expressed – to learning and memory,

Both have endured more than their fair share of experimentation. “I like to watch bees and I’ve studied behaviour for a lot of my career, so I empathise quite a lot with them already,” says Wright, who has been a vegetarian for decades. However, the numbers used in research are tiny compared to those sacrificed elsewhere, so she feels that it’s easier to justify.

It’s this sort of disregard of life in general that we have – you know, people just wantonly take life and destroy it and manipulate it from humans to mammals, insects to plants.” But while using insects for research is still largely uncontroversial, the discovery that they may think and feel raises a number of sticky conundrums for other fields.

There’s already a historical precedent for banning pesticides to protect certain insects – such as the EU-wide embargo on nicotinoids for the sake of bees. Could there be scope for moving away from others? And though insects are increasingly promoted as a noble and environmentally friendly alternative to meat from vertebrates, is this actually an ethical win? After all, you’d have to kill 975,225 grasshoppers to get the same volume of meat as you would from a single cow.

1. Perhaps one reason we don’t tend to think of insects as emotional is that it would be overwhelming.
2. Zaria Gorvett is a senior journalist for BBC Future and tweets @ZariaGorvett – Join one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram,
3. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “The Essential List”.

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What is the dead reckoning in ants?

Sahara desert ants navigate successfully while dragging their prey home – TK Sahara desert ants navigate successfully while dragging their prey home Credit Credit. Vincent Amouroux, Mona Lisa Production via, Science Source Sahara desert ants are special. They make their living by scavenging the bodies of other insects that have died from the heat, so they have evolved to forage in 140-degree temperatures.

They move fast, to keep from cooking themselves, in what is called a tripod gait — the front and rear legs on one side move in concert with the middle leg on the other. For six-legged creatures, it’s a fast way to get around, which is important when the desert is incredibly hot. Researchers in Germany wanted to find out a bit more about how the ants moved and navigated when confronted with a carcass — or, in the laboratory, a crumb — that was too big to carry.

It was obvious that the ants walked backward, dragging such prizes rather than carrying them. But it required some high-speed video and controlled experiments to determine whether the ants were still using the tripod gait and to investigate their navigational abilities when they were turned around.

Sarah Pfeffer, Matthias Wittlinger and Verena Wahl, all at the Institute of Neurobiology at the University of Ulm, set up several experiments in which these ants (in the genus Cataglyphis) had to haul crumbs too large to lift.The scientists presented their findings in in the.First, the researchers learned that the ants changed their gait when dragging a heavy load backward, moving one leg at a time rather than three, and not in a predictable pattern.

“Stability seems to be the reason,” Ms. Pfeffer said. Usually the ants emphasize speed, for which the tripod gait is suited, because they need to get their found food back to the protection of the underground colony as quickly as possible to avoid succumbing to furnace-like temperatures.

Ms. Pfeffer and Dr. Wittlinger also observed ants navigating with no external cues to help. Sahara desert ants are known to use a kind of dead reckoning to judge distance. This may be done by the ant brain’s counting steps during the tripod gait, when each stride is similar. The ants would need a different calculus for the single-step gait they use when dragging food home.

And they apparently have it, because the change in walking style did not interfere with their knack for finding their way back by a quick, efficient route — without a scent trail or other external signs. How the ants manage to switch gaits and body direction and still navigate without external cues is a matter for future study.

• A correction was made on : An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of one of the researchers.
• She is Verena L.
• Wahl, not Verna.
• A correction was made on : A report in the Observatory column on Tuesday about desert ants described their tripodal gait incorrectly.
• When they walk forward, the front and rear legs — not the hind and rear legs — on one side move in concert with the middle leg on the other.

How we handle corrections A version of this article appears in print on, Section D, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Walk This Way: Desert Ants Switch Gaits for Heavy Loads, | | : Ants March Differently, Depending on Direction (Published 2016)

What is the largest ant death spiral?

How to make ants commit suicide by going into a ‘spiral of death’ (which doesn’t always go ant-iclock-wise)

• By
• Published: 16:47 BST, 23 March 2012 | Updated: 09:10 BST, 24 March 2012
• Most ants navigate by using eyesight, but some army ants are completely blind – and it’s possible for them to become disorientated and march in circles until they die of exhaustion.
• It’s known as an ‘ant mill’ and is one of the strangest sights in nature.

Army ants navigate by following pheromone trails left behind by others. However, should enough of them lose the scent they begin to follow the ant immediately in front and a huge ant spiral forms. SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO Ant mill: Some species can become confused and end up marching in circles until they drop dead Army ants navigate by following pheromone trails left behind by others. However, should enough of them lose the scent they begin to follow the ant immediately in front and a huge ant spiral forms

1. The creatures are then unable to break free, owing to their lack of sight, and march around in a loop until they drop dead.
2. What’s more, it is possible to force them into this bizarre behaviour – though obviously it’s an act of cruelty to the ants.
3. You simply divert the ants into an enclosed space such as a plant pot.
4. The largest ant mill ever discovered was a staggering 1,200 feet in diameter, with each ant completing a circuit in two and a half hours.
5. When they’re not marching around in circles, army ants are one of the most efficient killing machines in the animal world.
6. The insects, found in South America, hunt in swarms of up to 200,000 individuals and are capable of killing 100,000 living creatures a day.

Cruel: It is possible to force ants into a spiral of death

• They eat essentially anything that moves and there’s very little defence, because they attack in such huge numbers.
• Cornell University entomologist Sean Brady, while studying army ants in South America, described the amazing phenomenon of the insects marching, which is entirely silent.
• He explained that you know they’re coming from the reactions of other creatures in the jungle.

He said: ‘The other insects are scared, and they make noises as they flee the invading army. Ant birds follow the ants from the sky and feast on the remnants left behind by the ants. ‘You will hear the high-pitched chirping of the other insects, and you’ll hear them and other small animals scurrying in fear.

What is the death trap of ants?

Now, scientists know precisely how they do it: As the hapless prey falls into its pit, an antlion at the bottom uses its head to fling a blizzard of sand grains up the funnel-shaped slope, creating a minilandslide that pulls the unfortunate insect to its doom.

Why do ants walk in zig zags?

This means that turns in one direction are likely followed by turns in the opposite direction after this distance. This meandering likely makes the search more efficient, as it allows ants to avoid crossing their own paths while staying close to the nest, avoiding return-travel time.