Ancient Ants
Posted on September 17, 2008 Comments (3)
Blind “Ant From Mars” Found in Amazon
The pale, eyeless ant appears to be adapted to living underground, possibly surfacing at night to forage. Its long mandibles suggest that the 0.08-inch-long (2-millimeter-long) animal is a predator, most likely of soft-bodied creatures such as termite larvae.
Christian Rabeling, a graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin, found a single specimen of the new species, thought to be a worker ant, in tropical soils near Manaus, Brazil. Rabeling’s team named the new creature Martialis heureka—”Martialis” means “of Mars
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The new species’ genes suggest that it broke away from the main ant family before the origin of all other living ant groups, which include 20 subfamilies that together contain more than 12,000 species.
Related: New Ant Species Discovered in the Amazon Likely Represents Oldest Living Lineage of Ants – Swimming Ants – Symbiotic relationship between ants and bacteria
Categories: Life Science, Students
Tags: ants, evolution, Life Science, wildlife
3 Responses to “Ancient Ants”
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September 18th, 2008 @ 5:12 am
wow. hopefully, we’ll find a way to slow down the rate at which we kill of ecosystems, so that more finds like these, if they exist, can be made.
February 7th, 2009 @ 9:40 pm
An interesting feature in these trimorphic species is that one of the three male forms was always female-like in morphology. These gamma males may thus employ a tactical deception to evade combat and earn sexual encounters…
June 13th, 2017 @ 4:02 pm
Incredible. I missed this when this discovery was made. Proff that we have only identified a small percentage of the species out there.