Important takeaway of ant poop
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Does ants poop? yes. Poo and ants are no exception to eating creatures.
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Because ants live nearby, they need to protect their colonies from feces to prevent bacteria and fungi from spreading healthy. This is why they use toilet chambers.
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Whether they quarantine it in the toilet room or kick it to the curb, the ants don’t keep it waste. But some ants use such things. One such species is leaf ants that cut off most of their leaves and use these leaves to grow very specific fungi.
Like urbanites, ants live nearby. Ant colonies can have thousands of individuals, and even tens of thousands of individuals, depending on the species. And like the eating creatures, ants are poop. Jessica Ware, curator and chair of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, combines the nearby quarter with feces and there’s a recipe for the disease.
“Ant poop can harbor bacteria. It contains partially indigested foods, allowing you to grow bacteria and fungi that can threaten the health of your colony,” Ware says.
However, the Ant colony does not contain the bed of illness. This is because ants are thorough about hygiene.
Ant poops, and Ant’s toilet is real
Ant colony is underground with ant rooms. (Image credit: lidok_l/shutterstock)
To keep themselves and the nest clean, ants have evolved several interesting housekeeping strategies. Some types of ants actually have toilets – or at least what we might call toilets.
Their nests are very complex, with many different tunnels and chambers, Ware explains, and one of those rooms is a toilet room. Even though ants feel the appeal of nature, they do not visit the toilet. Instead, the ants who have toilet duties gather poop and carry it to the toilet chamber, far away from the rest of the nest.
read more: Ants may cut off other ants to save them – is this a sign of empathy?
What does ant poop look like?
This isn’t as troublesome as it sounds. Like most insects, ants are water-restricted, Ware says. This results in small, hard, usually black or brownish pellets of poop. The poop is dry and hard enough that in ant species that does not have an indoor toilet room, workers will only drive the poop out of the nest.
Ants use poop as fertilizer
Whether they quarantine it in the toilet room or kick it to the curb, the ants don’t keep it waste. Well, at least not most types of ants. Some ants use such things. One such species is the leaf cutter ants.
“They basically take small cut-outs of the leaves and use these leaves to grow a very special fungus and eat them,” Ware says. “They don’t eat leaves, they eat fungi.” And yes, they use feces to fertilize crops. “They are basically gardeners,” Ware says.
If you want to see the Reefcutter Ali working in the garden, or if you happen to be in the New York City area, stop by the American Museum of Natural History. They have a large colony of fungal garden ants screen.
Other insects using toilets
Ants may have toilets, but termites even have wild ways to handle waste.
Termites and ants may seem like they’re in love at first sight, but they are not closely related. Ants are more closely related to bees, but termites are more closely related to cockroaches, explains Alam Mikalianan entomologist at North Carolina State University, studying the coevolution of insects and their gut microbiota. Therefore, the social lifestyle of ants “termites and termites” evolves independently, and their solutions to waste problems are completely different.
“Terrates have found a way to avoid distance from feces,” says Mikaelian. “Instead, they use the shit itself as building material.”
They are feeding wood, so they can do this, explains Mikariyan. When wood passes through the termite’s digestive system and moves into poop, it allows for a type of bacteria called actinobacteria. These bacteria are the source of many antibiotics used by humans. (Leaf cutter ants also use actinobacteria to keep fungal gardens parasite-free.) As such, unusual building materials can act as disinfectants. Mikaelian describes it as “a living disinfectant wall like the Clorox wall.”
Insect hygiene
It may be surprising that ants and termites are very clean and have an interest in hygiene, but that’s not really unusual.
“Insects are generally cleaner than we think,” Ware says. “We often think insects are really bad, but most insects don’t want to lie to their own filth.”
read more: The ancient ants once raided Europe 35 million years ago.
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Our author discovermagazine.com Our articles use peer-reviewed research and high-quality sources, and editors review scientific accuracy and editing criteria. Check out the sources used below in this article.
Avery Hart is a freelance science journalist. In addition to writing for Discover, she regularly writes about various outlets, both printed and online, including National Geographic, Science News Explores, Medscape, and WebMD. She is the author of Bullet who has your name. What You Probably Die, and What You Can Do About It, Clerisy Press 2007, and some books for younger readers. While attending university, Avery started out in journalism, writing for the school’s newspapers and editing student non-fiction magazines. Although she writes about all fields of science, she is particularly interested in AI-interests that developed while earning degrees in neuroscience, science of consciousness, and philosophy.
