These Ants Suit Up in a Protective 'Biomineral Armor' Never Seen Before in Insects
Leaf-cutter ant colonies like Acromyrmex echinatior can contain millions of ants, split into four castes that all have different roles to maintain a garden of fungus that the ants eat.
These farming ants might make a top-tier team of gardeners, but that doesn't mean they don't get into the occasional scrap, and living in such large groups usually also means facing an increased risk of pathogens.
For these reasons, a little protection never goes astray, and although scientists aren't entirely sure why, it seems these little guys needed protection enough to evolve their own natural body armour.
A team led by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison analysed this 'whitish granular coating' on A. echinatior and came to the conclusion that the coating is a self-made biomineral body armour - the first known example in the insect world.
Also at Science News.
Biomineral armor in leaf-cutter ants (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19566-3) (DX)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2020, @09:21AM (1 child)
cool facts, by the way.
I personally always thought of exoskeletons as body armors, but obviously I wasn't aware of the technical details.
I wonder if the stronger exoskeleton would allow for larger bodies. although I think the body size limit comes from breathing mechanisms rather than "collapse under own weight" problems...
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday November 27 2020, @07:06AM
Only if you're using a centralised breathing mechanism.
(Score: 5, Funny) by VLM on Thursday November 26 2020, @05:03PM
Here's an epic quote from the scientific paper:
"In direct combat with the substantially larger and stronger At. cephalotes soldier workers (average body length of 10.4 mm and a head capsule width of 6.1 mm, compared to major Ac. echinatior body length of 6.4 mm and head capsule width of 2.9 mm) (Fig. 4b), ants with biomineralized cuticles lost significantly fewer body parts (Fig. 4c and Supplementary Fig. 17) and had significantly higher survival rates compared to biomineral-free ants (Fig. 4d, Supplementary Movies 2 and 3)."
Absolutely epic hosting "ant wars" like watching W40K battles to reverse engineer unit statistic numbers. "Well clearly the xeno necron 'bugs' with optional biomineral armor have a one point advantage on their to-wound chart" but what I want to know is does the biomineral armor have an initiative or move distance impairment? Also how many points does biomineral armor cost per unit? Finally, 'whitish granular coating', really, just thin your paints a bit and it'll look better. Also you know how Games Workshop is, how much extra are they charging per mini for this biomineral armor, or is this resin ForgeWorld product that costs like $50 per gram?
Nothing I love more than forgeworld and clicking around and seeing a necron seraptek heavy construct resin model is a mere $325 and being thankful I'm not addicted to W40K anymore. Although it is fun to build and paint minis, and snow blizzard days are coming up, and where is my airbrush, and ... oh shit here we go again...