Date: April
19, 2018
Source:
Pensoft Publishers
Summary:
When their colony is threatened by an
intruder, workers of a newly discovered species of ant can actually tear their
own body apart, in order to release toxins and either kill or hold off the
enemy. The new species is the first of the so-called 'exploding ants' to be
described since 1935.
Amongst the countless fascinating plants and
animals inhabiting the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia, there are the
spectacular "exploding ants," a group of arboreal, canopy dwelling
ants nicknamed for their unique defensive behaviour.
When threatened by other insects, minor
workers can actively rupture their body wall. Apart from leading to the ants'
imminent death, the "explosion" releases a sticky, toxic liquid from
their enlarged glands, in order to either kill or hold off the enemy.
Curiously enough, while these ants' peculiar
behaviour was first mentioned in distant 1916, no new species have been
formally described since 1935, due to insufficient evidence. Instead,
scientists used to simply refer to them as the members of a remarkable species
group -- Colobopsis cylindrica,
better known as "the exploding ants."
That was until an interdisciplinary research
team from Austria, Thailand and Brunei came together led by their shared
fascination with these insects and their extraordinary mechanism of
self-sacrifice (also called autothysis) in 2014. Thus, entomologists,
botanists, microbiologists, and chemists from the Natural History Museum
Vienna, Technical University Vienna, IFA Tulln and Universiti Brunei Darussalam
together identified roughly 15 separate species of exploding ants, with one of
them now described as new to science in the open access journal ZooKeys.
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