Natures wonders: amazing insect group activities (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 10, 2022, 18:26 (500 days ago) @ David Turell

Much new research into insect group activities:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-12-08/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/can-the-c...

the day of the nuptial flight of the harvester ants. Once a year, on the first sunny day after the first rain, these ants take wing in their multitudes, from all their colonies. These creatures, so closely identified with the ground on which they walk, suddenly sprout translucent wings and soar into the skies.

During this flight, male and female ants mate. After a flying bride mates with several males from neighboring colonies and bears their seed within her, she lands back on earth, sheds her nuptial wings and looks for a site to establish a new colony. The future queen starts by creating an initial nesting space in which, from then until her death some two decades later, she will lay millions of eggs, all of them fertilized by sperm in that one, single nuptial flight. From the eggs, larvae will emerge, which will develop into worker ants.

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At the same time, other ants build scaffolding using silk-like threads. Where do the threads come from? The ants hold their larvae in their mouth, and extrude the thread from the latter’s bodies. The threads are used as a means of attachment to a nearby leaf, and so on from one leaf to the next, until a ball of leaves is formed that is quite sturdy on the outside and empty on the inside. The ants can accomplish this with virtually any type of leaf. When the structure is sufficiently stable, they build chambers inside it with their silk threads, one floor after another, room after room with openings between them – a veritable apartment building.

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All [ants], without exception, live in groups and mature together as a collective that confronts the array of challenges. Perhaps the most intriguing fact about them is that, like their cousins, the bees, ants do everything without a leader dictating their actions.

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Her team also examined what happens to this apian structure when vibrations or shaking, threaten to break it apart. It turns out that the bees simply create a more physically durable alternative when faced with such a challenge. “You can call it a ‘collective brain’ or ‘distributed decision making,’ which is not dependent on a hierarchical order from a leader,” Peleg says

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In another study, Peleg sought to examine how information is conveyed between bees. Much has been said about these creatures’ complex social structure – they have one queen and many workers, and they communicate with each other through pheromones (chemicals that are secreted or excreted and trigger a social response).

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Another intriguing insect, when it comes to the subject of synchronized and social behavior, is the firefly. Scientists say that the firefly’s mischievous flickering is a form of communication whose goal is copulating.

“A firefly of a certain species is looking for a firefly from the same species in order to mate. They identify each other by means of specific flickering, which is unique only to that species,” Peleg explains. “It’s a simple signal, which resembles Morse code, or 0 and 1 [binary] computer language.

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“Grasshoppers aren’t social by definition, [meaning they are not] divided into castes such as queen and workers,” Prof. Ayali says. “But on the other hand, it’s not for nothing that they are so famous for their swarms, from biblical times down to the present."

"They display collective behavior, and especially collective movement. In the lab we are investigating the interactions between individuals, and between the individual and the group, and how the collective organizes and decides, for example, that they will all turn left now.”

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Ayali: “The grasshopper is effectively using a speed filter in order to find logic in what is happening around it within a crowded, dense swarm. It ignores things that don’t interest it and chooses to relate only to objects that are moving at the speed of another grasshopper.

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there is a sweeping scientific consensus that it’s thanks to insects that most other life forms on the planet have been made possible. In other words, without insects we would not be able to exist. Insects pollinate plants, including those cultivated by humans; they recycle organic waste; preserve the health of the soil and constitute a source of food for birds, fish and many other animals. If the insect population decreases, basic natural processes will not be able to occur, including the growth of trees.

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In the past 50 years, as a result of expansion of the human population, the displacement of animals from their natural habitats, the use of pesticides and global warming – the number of insects in the world has decreased by 75 percent. This development is aptly being called the “insect apocalypse.”

“We warn that, if no action is taken to better understand and reduce the action of climate change on insects, we will drastically reduce our ability to build a sustainable future based on healthy, functional ecosystems,” dozens of leading scientists worldwide warned. i

Comment: As usual I think God programmed these guys to do their intelligent work. Note how vital they are to our ecosystems. I've only presented a few of the examples in this enormous article.