The weight of all ants on Earth is roughly equal to the weight of all humans- aka there are a lot of ants. And can be found everywhere mammals are able to live. So they make sense as a food source
While comparing things... a colony of leaf-cutter ants (which form some of the largest colonies with as many as 2 million individuals when the colony is mature) has roughly the same metabolic rate as cow (easily measured from the CO2 at the exits of their nest). So don't think of ants as tiny animals, think of ant colonies as fairly large animals.
> aka there are a lot of ants
This is true
And easier to predate on at scale than humans.
I was thinking maybe that's why the evolved stingers, but it turns out ants evolved from stinging wasps not vice versa.
Your username makes me think you'd be a good person to ask:
Sorry, what? (Edit, this sounds like I don't believe you, but it is more that I am in disbelief!) Ants evolved from stinging wasps? Were they flying at that time? Or were wasps at some point non-flying and the 'wasps' grouping is a wide one like 'beetles' is?
This is such a fascinating space I know very little about.
Yes, ants evolved from wasps, and it's really not that surprising if you take a close look at a typical ant and a typical wasp, pretty much the only difference are wings and coloring. There also exist wingless wasps, and some of them are black and really quite indistinguishable from ants by non-entomologist. And that's after over 100 million years since the ants diverged from the wasps! Talk about a successful evolutionary design. Your closest relative from 100 million years ago was a little vaguely rat-like thing. (Edit to answer your specific question: the ancestor of ants and wasps obviously was winged and flying, since both families still have at least some winged members).
As a sibling has already pointed out ants do fly during "nuptial flight", and then discard their wings... wings would only be a hindrance for their largely underground lifestyle. Also ants have retained the stinger which also functions as an ovipositor (egg layer), and some species still use it for defense and pack a wallop of a poison, right up there with some of the of the worst wasps. Google "bullet ant" for some good stuff. Other ants just bite, and the burning you feel is from their saliva which consists mostly of an acid named after ants: fourmic acid (ant is "formica" in latin).
Edit to add one more random factoid that will surprise a lot of people: termites are not related to ants at all, and they evolved from... (drumroll)... cockroaches! It's rather harder to see the resemblance, except for their diet... both are capable of digesting (with help from endosymbiotic microbes) pure cellulose. And while termites don't really resemble ants either, parallel evolution has chosen the same strategy of retaining the wings for the fertile individuals who go on a nuptial flight and then discard their wings and try to found new colonies.
I don’t know the answer to your questions off the top of my head, unfortunately, but they are most certainly answered in The Ants by E.O. Wilson. It’s a fascinating and artfully written book. I unfortunately gave my copy to a student, or I’d have found the relevant passage for you. (The biomass fact mentioned in a parent comment is mentioned in the book as well.)
Yeah I was surprised too! I don't actually know that much about ants or biology, but
- (1) ants fly!
well they don't usually fly, but they spread wings and fly during a "nuptual flight" to start new colonies [0]. I only learned this a few years ago when I moved into the woods and mass migrations of flying ants often.
From what I can see, all wasps fly, and I can't find anything saying their common ancestor couldn't fly. So since ants can partially fly, I think it's much more likely they evolved from a flying ancestor. They just lost lost the ability to fly most of the time and totally dominated the land niche.
Incidentally, living in the woods has also taught me that there are a variety of wasps that live underground like ants do. I used to think they all built open-air hives.
- (2) I made that comment mostly based on a paper [1] I found while googling around. According to the paper:
> The stinging wasps (Hymenoptera: Aculeata) are an extremely diverse lineage of hymenopteran insects, encompassing over 70,000 described species.... The most well-studied lineages of Aculeata are the ants... and the bees
This is consistent with what I've seen on Wikipedia. Basically ants, bees, and wasps are very closely related. The Wikipedia page on Aculeata [2] has a nice family tree that includes sawflies, bees, and wasps.
So yes, wasps is wide like beetles. But there are more beetles. Beetles get their own order, whereas stinging wasps, bees, and ants have an "infraorder", which I guess is like an order but smaller. The Wikipedia article on Hymenoptera has a family tree that shows the relationship with beetles [3].
[0] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/when-why-winged-ants-swarm-nu...
[1] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)...
You mean "i.e." I believe
You may not like it, but this is what peak mammalian performance looks like.
Ant eater pickup line.
At the end of all things, when evolution has reached its inevitable end, all that will be left is a war between ant eaters and crabs.
I think cockroaches might have something to say about this.
Ant eating crabs.
Crab eating ants.
We'll kill the ones that eat us and eat the ones we kill.
Crabs are already quite susceptible to ants, due to ants being small enough to swarm and attack the joints and gaps of the crab's carapace.
What about a crab made out of ants?
If you take Woody Guthrie's old story about rabbits hiding from the dogs [0] and change rabbits to ants and dogs to mammals you have the evolutionary tale of the ant.
Top-shelf HN thread! So far I have learned:
- the evolved 12-times thing
- ants are descended from wasps
- insectivorous aardwolves
what a day
an aardwolf can hunt up to 300,000 in a single night
I can see the shear abundance of ants tilting the scale of evolution's nonlinearity.
Reminds me of Mitch Hedberg, ~"[Ants are] great if you're ever really hungry and want to eat 2000 of something."
A bit like [carcinisation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation) for crustaceans
Another one is, believe it or not, trees: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
Trees really aren't a good example of convergent evolution. The evidence tends more toward "all plants have woodiness genes, and sometimes those genes can be activated/deactivated".
Fruits are, though.
And then you have trenacisation for transportation systems.
Things evolve to eat delicious things.
Did any anteater dinosaurs exist before that?
Ant eating dinosaurs exist today: https://learnbirdwatching.com/birds-that-eat-ants/
how many times things evolved into sharks?
ichtiozaur, dolphin/orca
anything else?
The mosasaurs also developed a caudal fin (vertical, like sharks and ichthyosaurs, not horizontal like whales and dolphins) and eventually they became quite shark-like, though not as fish-like as ichthyosaurs.
Between ichthyosaurs (who evolved in Triassic) and mosasaurs (who evolved in Cretaceous) there existed also a group of marine crocodiles (Metriorhynchidae; who evolved in Jurassic), which also had caudal fins and were quite shark-like.
So there have been at least 4 groups of amniotes that looked like sharks, cetaceans among mammals and at least 3 groups of diapsids.
However all these marine predators looked like sharks from the point of view of locomotion, but none of them had the kind of teeth specialized for cutting that are characteristic for sharks. Teeth resembling those of sharks are found only among some other fish, e.g. piranhas, whose bodies do not resemble sharks.
I guess we’ll see if they have the endurance. Sharks have been around for a while after all. But, Orca have surpassed sharks in terms of badassery, right? And it isn’t that close. They aren’t evolving into sharks, they are the upgrade!
Beyond ichthyosaurs and cetaceans, carcharhinification (shark-like convergent evolution) also occurred in plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, certain teleost fish like barracuda, and even the extinct thalattosuchian crocodylomorphs.
Jurassic-Cretaceous marine crocodiles (like also ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs) looked like sharks, i.e. they depended mostly on their caudal fin for swimming.
On the other hand, there was no resemblance between sharks and plesiosaurs or pliosaurs. The latter swimmed using their lateral fins, somewhat like marine turtles and penguins, not like sharks. Also the dentition of plesiosaurs and pliosaurs had no similarity to sharks, so except for being big predators there were no resemblances between them.