ANTS REMEMBER THEIR ENEMY’S SMELL

Ant colonies are able to form what is known as a collective memory. When one ant has a fight with an intruder ant from a different colony it remembers the odor from that one ant. The ant then passes the odor of the intruder ant to the rest of the other ants in its colony. This then enables any of the other ants in the colony to recognize the intruder ant if it once again tries to fight another ant in the same            colony.    For many ant species chemicals are essential for them to be able to function as a society. Ants identify other members of their own colony by having what is called a signature chemical. This allows the ants of that colony to identify who is one of their nest – mates and who isn’t. So if any of the ants from that colony manage to pick out an unfamiliar odor that they don’t know of they are able to warn the other ants that there could be an intruder trying to enter and maybe attack the rest of the ants.    A team of researches from the university of Melbourne set out to find out whether ants were able to retain memories of the odors they have previously encountered. This team focused on the weaver ant. The weaver ants build their homes inside of trees. There can be up to five hundred thousand worker ants living inside a nest at one time. The team set up a test where ants from another nest could meet with an intruder ant from a different colony; this familiarized the ants with the intruder’s odor. Next they took twenty ants from the ant nest that another colony had been familiarized with and the intruders were attacked straight away. The ants defending their colony reacted much more aggressively towards the intruder ants that the worker ants had been familiarized with in the previous test.          B Y   N A T H A N   H E R O N         9  B L U E