Nationwide Harbor, Md. — face patterns in pictures of greater than 11,000 sorts of ants struck entomologist Clint Penick as a advantageous pandemic-lockdown venture for his college students.
From that socially distanced slog got here the concept that the feel patterns may supply sensible advantages, says Penick, of Auburn College in Alabama. For example, some soil-dwelling ants with raised, swirling facial ridges — “nearly psychedelic,” he says — may very well be getting further safety from abrasion. The ridges lie so shut collectively that sand grains can’t slot in between, he reported at the Entomology 2023 assembly in November.
Most ants have a {smooth} outer floor, or cuticle. However some develop elaborate patterns, resembling tiny indentations “like dimples on a golf ball” or netted patterns like “cracks in mud,” says Penick, who began the venture whereas at Kennesaw State College in Georgia. Ant taxonomists use greater than 150 phrases to explain the completely different cuticle patterns, with completely different names for some refined distinctions. “They drive individuals like me loopy,” he says.
Mapping face textures onto an evolutionary tree of ant genera means that fashionable ant lineages should have advanced from smooth-faced ancestors, reported Penick and his former grad pupil John Paul Hellenbrand, now on the Metropolis College of New York, in April in Myrmecological Information. Since ants first emerged some 160 million to 140 million years in the past close to the start of the Cretaceous Interval, varied face textures have appeared, disappeared and typically reappeared. The a number of origins bought the researchers questioning if the patterns may very well be of use to the bugs as a substitute of simply random organic happenstance.
Textures that look the identical, nevertheless, won’t yield the identical profit in several species, cautions evolutionary morphologist Brendon Boudinot of the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past in Washington, D.C.
For example, probably abrasion-resistant fingerprint-like ridges present up in desert-dwelling, sand-digging Pogonomyrmex ants but additionally of their neighbors, trap-jaw Odontomachus ants. But trap-jaw ants “don’t push their faces by way of sand,” Boudinot says, so abrasion isn’t a lot of a difficulty. Nonetheless, entice jaws can snap shut with such power that the ants launch into the air quick and much sufficient to flee hazard (SN: 5/15/15). Their curved face stripes, Boudinot speculates, may “diffuse stress or pressure when these jaws are cocked.” However these concepts, he notes, want testing.
Penick agrees that affirmation of any doable advantages to cuticle patterns want experiments as a substitute of simply image sorting. He can think about different potential upsides: Some patterns may bolster structural help, affect biofilm development or perform in ant communication.
One confirmed advantage of the ant facial options, nevertheless, is for people solely. Penick recruited textile designer Meredith West Owens of Wilmington, N.C., to show elements of ant face pictures into multicolored materials. Pulling small sections from face pictures, she coloured, stacked and blended every motif right into a seamless circulate. The impact took “plenty of math,” she says. Her ornamental ant-inspired pillows plus a face T-shirt, now offered on-line, will elevate slightly cash for Penick’s lab.
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