Transcript

Picture yourself crawling through a small tunnel you dug in wet, clayey soil.

You are a tiny ant in your tiny tunnel. You are Solenopsis fugax, a thief ant, and you are about to pull off a heist.

Hi and welcome to the Insect Insights, chill insect stories to relax and wonder, available wherever podcasts are. If you like this podcast, you can subscribe, leave a review and even an insect question, on spotify or on the website. I am Max, your host, and I hope you are ready to dive into insect knowledge for another insight!

Tiny, tiny ant. Only a few millimeters long. Cuticle so thin it’s almost see through, without pigment to protect your inside from the sun! Well, you mostly stay underground, so that’s ok. The only time you risk your little worker body above ground is when you have to accompany your giant winged sisters for their mating flight. And today isn’t flight day, it’s heist day. Every Solenopsis knows heists happen underground…

You continue crawling up your tunnel. You are now at the end of it, and need to continue digging just a little further… Breaching in the chamber. Just on the other side of the wall sits a treasure you want to get your mandibles on.

You dig for a minute, creating an doorway to the vast chamber opening itself to you. The nice smell of ant brood floods your antennae, as does the small of formic acid. You finished digging the way to a Lasius ant nest, directly inside a brood chamber… Brood you intend to steal.

But not now, not alone! A heist requires you to assemble a team. You turn around and crawl back to your nest, carefully laying track pheromones on your way. Once back home, all you have to do is use one of your glands to spread another pheromone telling everybody to follow the chemical path to this promising place to rob.

And the heist can now begin! Well, with hundreds of your siblings going up the tunnel and swarming the chamber, it feels more like a raid than a heist. Also your way to make sure the locals don’t bother you doesn’t feel sneaky and elusive, to be honest.

The secret of your operation, besides building the tunnel, resides in your poison gland. It’s not exactly poison you secrete, just something the local Lasius ants are really not into figuring if it’s poisonous or not. From the first instant you let its smell disperse in the chamber, all of the ants of this foreign nest escaped, leaving their babies completely defenseless. And lucky you, little Solenopsis, because the Lasius would have been some solid defense for you to face, given that they are three, sometimes four times your size.

But thanks to your chemical innovation, there’s no fight to be had during the raid, you simply take what you want and carry it home. Eggs, larvae, even pupae, if you can fit them up your small tunnel! What a feast, really.

Sources

Blum, M. S., Jones, T. H., Hölldobler, B., Fales, H. M., & Jaouni, T. (1980). Alkaloidal venom mace: Offensive use by a thief ant. Naturwissenschaften, 67(3), 144–145. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01073620

Hölldobler, B. (1973). Chemische Strategie beim Nahrungserwerb der Diebsameise (Solenopsis fugax Latr.) und der Pharaoameise (Monomorium pharaonis L.) (Chemical Strategy during Foraging in Solenopsis fugax Latr. and Monomorium pharaonis L.). Oecologia, 11(4), 371-380.