LONDON: Ants have a remarkably sophisticated sense of smell, allowing them to pick up odors that dictate how they behave and how they interact with each other, a new study says.
Each ant has a subtle, unique aroma, made from a blend of chemicals called pheromones stuck on the outside of its body. Minute differences in each ant’s body odor provide behavioral cues that allow the insects to maintain complex social colonies with different roles for queens, workers, nurses and soldiers — all without saying a word. Using exquisitely sensitive antennae instead of noses, they can even sniff out an intruder from another colony, according to a study published this week in Cell Reports.
“We are trying to decipher the language of chemicals that [ants] use to organize themselves into societies,” said Anandasankar Ray, an entomologist at UC Riverside and the research team leader
Ray’s team began by putting Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus) on glass slides under a microscope and zooming in 1,000 times on their antennae, so they could see the hundreds of tiny sensory hairs that coat them. Next, they inserted a very thin glass electrode into a single sensory hair in order to record any biochemical activity on the insects’ antennae. In doing so, they were able to pinpoint the exact chemicals that ants could smell emitting from the queen, the workers and from ants from another colony.
