What do ants eat

Ants are famous for their omnivorous nature. And not even so much forest and field ants, which can be found busily carrying a dried leaf, a dead fly or a bread crumb into an anthill. Pharaoh ants, common household pests, are especially distinguished by their versatility in nutrition. They can find abundant food sources even in a perfectly clean apartment. Sometimes it seems that these ants eat everything: a drop of oil that has fallen on the floor behind a tile, crumbs near the baseboard, sugar that has not been swept from the table - and on this food a whole anthill grows and develops safely.

But scientists who studied in detail what ants eat, found out that after all, these insects cannot be called indiscriminate swallows. In the choice of food, they are very similar to humans: although their diet may include thousands of products, they eat according to a strict system. And besides, among ants there are such gourmets for whom only one very rare and exotic product is suitable for food.

 

Standard diet of the most common ant species

The nutrition of ants of most species is a wide range of simple products of both animal and vegetable origin.Pharaoh ants, and in the tropics - other species that settle in residential buildings, actively and with pleasure also eat synthetic foods used for the preparation of semi-finished products or as seasonings.

It is noteworthy that the ants drag all the products that they come across into the anthill, after which all this food ration is divided in a certain order among the members of the colony:

• the larvae eat mainly protein foods of animal origin. In nature, these are the remains of other insects or larger animals, eggs of various pests, and in a house or apartment - additionally dairy products, gelatin, and the remains of egg dishes. For larvae, protein food is essential - they need to grow and develop.

  

• Adult ants feed mainly on easily digestible carbohydrate food - fruit pulp, seeds, nuts, plant rhizomes, tree sap, honeydew, and in living quarters - honey, sugar, jam.

In ants, it is difficult to isolate any product that prevails in the diet. If only because each species occupies its own ecological niche and specializes in obtaining certain feed.

On a note

Some ants are obligate predators. For example, wandering ants or cerapachis ants feed almost exclusively on insects at all stages of their development.

The queen also feeds mainly on protein food, and in many species, the ants caring for the queen specially chew food for her and provide the most convenient “dessert” for consumption.

The basis of the carbohydrate diet in many species of ants is honeydew and honeydew. The first is the sweet juices secreted by the leaves of trees during sharp fluctuations in temperature.The second is the sugary secretions of certain insects, among which aphids are best known.

It is interesting

According to scientists, in ordinary red wood ants, honeydew makes up about 60% of the diet! No wonder these forest workers are so attached to their herds of milking aphids.

And carpenter ants collect gums as a source of carbohydrates - the well-known tree resin secreted in places where the bark of a tree is damaged. Nevertheless, they are also very attached to aphid colonies - all ants need to eat often, and gum is released on the bark intermittently.

In reaper ants, the basis of the carbohydrate diet is dry grass seeds - a fairly coarse and solid food. The work of the soldiers of these ants in their free time from the defense of the nest is to grind such seeds with powerful jaws to produce a kind of soft gruel, which the rest of the colony can eat.

 

How often do ants eat?

Ants feed frequently - several times a day. As a rule, forager ants (those whose task is to find and transport food) combine business with pleasure, eating part of the food taken to the anthill. Ants in the anthill are constantly fed from the collected stocks.

It is interesting

Many anthills are inhabited by insects that have adapted to the neighborhood with ants - some beetles and their larvae, certain types of moths. Usually they protect themselves with the ability to secrete honeydew, thanks to which the ants not only do not offend them, but also allow them to feed on their own eggs.Each ant that runs past such a tenant will not miss the opportunity to tickle the beetle or caterpillar with its antennae and receive a portion of sweet syrup in return.

Ants can starve for a long time only during the wintering period, and then only during wintering with hypothermia. Most domestic ants wintering underground do not hibernate, and in winter they continue to be actively awake in a clogged anthill. For food during this period, they use previously collected abundant supplies.

It is interesting

Reaper ants, common in the southern regions of our country, can collect up to a kilogram of seeds in an anthill during the warm period of the year - this is quite enough for them for a normal life of the colony in winter. During wintering, there are no larvae in the anthill, and the colony does not need protein food. By the way, seeds make up about 97% of the diet of harvester ants.

During wintering, ants can starve, especially when the temperature drops. Ants living in the northern part of Russia can hibernate up to 9 months a year without eating anything.

On a note

Fans of keeping ant colonies at home know that the main rule for successful breeding of ants is the constant availability of food in free access for insects. Even during wintering, when an artificial anthill is placed in a refrigerator, food is constantly put into the feeder: at temperatures above zero, some foragers can run out of the nest in search of food.

An important type of food for all ants is the so-called trophic eggs - eggs laid by the uterus during a period of excess food and do not develop into larvae. Their ants eat when there is a lack of other food in the "hungry" months.

 

Ants-gourmets, or examples of narrow food specialization

Among ants, there are a large number of species that prefer to eat only one or two products instead of a wide variety of food. Among these types are the following:

• Leaf cutter ants are one of the few living creatures in general that have learned to farm. They collect pieces of leaves bitten by foragers in an anthill, chew these leaves into a mushy mass, put them in special chambers in a nest that act as greenhouses and feed on mushrooms developing in the leaf mass. At the same time, the leaves themselves are not suitable for ants, because they are too coarse and malnourishing.

  

• Centromyrmex ants that eat termites exclusively.
• Ponerins are a subfamily of ants, each species of which specializes in feeding on one or another type of insect.
• The dracula ant is a unique species with a very narrow food specialization. Its adults feed exclusively on the juices of their own larvae. And the larvae themselves, in turn, do not suffer from this at all. At the same time, adult ants catch various insects, centipedes and spiders, but they themselves do not eat them, but feed them to the growing shift.

At the same time, the nutrition of ant larvae is so specific that it should be discussed separately.

 

What do ant larvae eat?

According to the method of feeding, the larvae of different species of ants are divided into two types:

• capable of self-feeding
• and unable to feed themselves.

The latter are more numerous. Adult ants feed them by the trophollaxis method, that is, by passing semi-digested food from their esophagus to the larva.

Larvae that are able to feed themselves eat dead insects or other protein food brought into the anthill, sometimes trophic eggs and even larvae from other anthills. And only leaf-cutting ants feed their younger generation with grown mushrooms.

On a note

Due to the fact that mid-latitude ants do not have access to protein food in winter, they usually produce one generation in one year in a temperate climate, and only adult ants that can feed on plant reserves leave for wintering. In the same ants that hibernate during the winter, the larvae can also hibernate - in a state of anabiosis, they do not need food.

From what kind of food the larva receives, it will depend on whether it will turn after pupation into a working ant or into an individual capable of reproduction - the uterus. In this way, the anthill is similar to a real democratic society: the worker ants in it decide how many workers will be in each colony, and how many continue the family.

 

Interesting video: how ants eat sausage (shooting is accelerated by 700 times)