About 1,000 northern hairy wood ants are expected to have tiny radio tags, about 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) long, attached to their bodies, allowing researchers to track their movements on a protected English estate.
The wood ants, which get their name from the "eyebrows" visible through a microscope, live in colonies housed within nests connected by trails worn into the ground by years of ant traffic. The biologist doing the work, Samuel Ellis of the University of York, intends to examine how the ants interact with one another.
The results are expected to help staff at the Longshaw Estate in Derbyshire manage the estate — a natural and archaeological site —with the ants' needs in mind.
Continued: http://www.livescience.com/22801-english-ants-transmitters-tracking.html
The wood ants, which get their name from the "eyebrows" visible through a microscope, live in colonies housed within nests connected by trails worn into the ground by years of ant traffic. The biologist doing the work, Samuel Ellis of the University of York, intends to examine how the ants interact with one another.
The results are expected to help staff at the Longshaw Estate in Derbyshire manage the estate — a natural and archaeological site —with the ants' needs in mind.
Continued: http://www.livescience.com/22801-english-ants-transmitters-tracking.html
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