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| Ants in Amber (Photo by Brocken Inaglory) |
Why concentrate upon the powers of a fictional Ant-Man when actual ants are just as amazing?
Did you know, for example, that ants can carry up to 50 times their own body weight? Debbie Hadley of About.com explains that their muscle-to-size ratio is greater than that of larger creatures, including humans.
Ants began farming about 50 million years before humans did. Their agricultural methods include the use of manure fertilization and mold-growth inhibitors.
Ants have figured out how to get the dirty work done by enslaving members of their own species. In addition, they are masters at wheeling and dealing. Ants “herd” aphids in
order to share in their sweet-sap wealth. They
protect certain plants “in exchange for food and shelter.”
Ants have been around for way longer than humans, and there are way more of them than there are of us. Because “there are at least 1.5 million ants on the planet for every human being,” their total biomass is roughly equal to ours.
So forget Ant-Man and look out for ants. The latter have
been able to “outwit, outlast, and outplay humans” for millennia.
Resources
http://insects.about.com/od/antsbeeswasps/a/10-cool-facts-about-ants.htm
Copyright July 19, 2015 by Linda Van Slyke All Rights Reserved
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