Ever stomp an ant? We’ve got bad news: his friends might be coming for you.
Ants, it turns out, develop a collective memory when it comes to smells of other ants who have offended them, or owe them money. If an ant, specifically a tropical weaver ant, runs into an ant from a rival colony, it passes on the smell of that ant to all his buddies. Of which there are 500,000 or so per colony.
Scientists at the University of Melbourne tested this out by introducing rival ants of the same species to a few workers, and then a week later just cold dropping a few onto the nest, where they were immediately brutally ripped apart. Science!
Of course, they all turned up mysteriously skeletonized a week later, so, uh, yeah, maybe avoid ticking off the ants.
[ via the antlions at the BBC ]
image courtesy Shutterstock