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By Jake Buehler
Ants are famous for putting themselves at risk for the well-being of their colony, but the harvester ants of the desert (Veromessor pergandei) are particularly heroic. New research suggests that insects load into webs of spiders to save their nestmates trapped, sometimes tearing silk to free them.
The researchers first observed ants without fear in 2015 in the Mojave and Sonora deserts. The insects not only released their comrades from the sticky silk, but they then dismantled the entire canvas, which she tore with her jaw until 2 o'clock, the team said. The American naturalist. The rescues were not without personal risk; about 6% of rescuers remained stuck in silk or were caught by the nearby hidden spider.
When the scientists brought the ants back to their laboratory, they discovered that the insects did not know the empty canvases. The team suspects their courage to see their chemical distress signals issued by their siblings connected to the Web.
The results have put the desert harvesting ants into an exclusive club of animals that adopt a "rescue behavior", which is usually reserved for mammals like primates and dolphins. Even fewer are those who destroy traps, limited in vertebrates to two groups of chimpanzees and mountain gorillas that dismantle the traps of poachers.
Researchers believe that the heroic series of ants may have evolved because V. pergandei must collect enough seeds for the colony to produce hundreds of new ants every day. This makes every hunter's life – and his work – indispensable.
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