Ants Do Poop and They Even Use Toilets to Fertilize Their Own Gardens

Important inferences

• Are the ants poop? Yes. Eating any creature will poop and ants are not an exception.

• Since the ants live in nearby neighborhoods, they should protect the colony from their feces, so that bacteria and fungal health do not infect their health. That’s why they use toilet rooms.

• Whether they are isolated in a toilet room, they jump to the sidewalk, ants do not keep their waste around. However, some ants find a use for these things. This type of species is a leaf cutting ant that receives small clippings of the leaves and uses these leaves to grow a very special mushroom they eat later.

Like urban people, ants live in nearby neighborhoods. Ant colonies can host thousands, even tens of thousands of people depending on species. And eating, ants poop. Jessica Ware, the curator and head of the invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, has a recipe for the disease when you combine close neighborhoods and a lot of feces.

“It can host the ant bacteria and contain partially undigested foods, and can grow bacteria and mushrooms that can threaten the health of the colony,” Ware says.

However, ant colonies are not disease beds. Because ants are meticulous about hygiene.

The ants make poops and ant toilets are real

Ants have developed some interesting cleaning strategies to keep them clean. Some ants actually have toilets – or at least there is something we can call toilet.

The nests are very complex, with many different tunnels and rooms, Ware explains Ware and one of these rooms toilet room. Ants do not visit the toilet when they feel the call of nature. Instead, the toilet workers collect ants poop and carry them to the toilet room away from other parts of the nest.

Read more: Ants can amput the other ants to save them – is this a sign of empathy?

What does ant poop look like?

This is not as messy as it seems. Like most insects, ants are limited to water, Ware says Ware, so they’re trying to get as much fluid from their food as much as possible. This results in small, hard, usually black or brownish poo pellets. The poop is dry and hard enough, so that for the types of ant species that do not have interior toilet rooms, workers can throw the poop out of the nest.

Ants use poop as fertilizer

Whether they are isolated in a toilet room, they jump to the sidewalk, ants do not keep their waste around. At least most of them do not make an ant species. Some ants find a use for these things. Such a type of leafucucuer is an ant.

“They basically buy small leaf clippings and use these leaves to grow a very special mushroom they eat later, Ware says Ware. “They don’t eat leaves, they eat mushrooms.” And yes, they use their poops to fertilize their crops. “Basically gardeners, Ware says Ware.

If you want to see Leafcutter ants at work in the gardens and if you are in the New York City area, leave it by the American Museum of Natural History. There is a large mushroom guardian colony on it display.

Other insects using toilet

Ants may have toilets, but there are even ways to cope with the wastes of termites.

Termites and ants may seem similar at first glance, but are not closely related. Ants are more closely related to bees, thermites are more closely related to cockroaches. Aram MikaelyanNorth Carolina is an entomologist at the State University of North Carolina, examining the evolution of insects and intestinal microbiomas together. In other words, the social lifestyles of ants and termitations have developed independently and their solutions to the problem of waste are quite different.

“Termites found a way not to remove themselves from feces, Mika says Mikalyan. “Instead, they use the stool itself as a building material.”

Mikalyan can do that because they feed on wood. When the wood passes from the digestive systems of the thermites to the poop, it provides a kind of bacteria called Actinobacteria. These bacteria are the source of many antibiotics used by people. (Leaf sulfur also uses Actinobacteria to keep the mushroom gardens away from parasites.) Thus, the unusual building material acts as disinfectant. Mikaelyan describes this as a “a disinfectant wall that lives almost like a Clorox wall”.

Insect hygiene

It may seem surprising that ants and termitations are very regularly and about hygiene, but it is not really rare.

“Insects are cleaner than we think in general, W Ware says. “We often think of insects as disgusting, but most insects do not want to sleep in their filth.”

Read more: An old ant army once raided Europe 35 million years ago

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Avery Hurt is a free science journalist. In addition to writing for Discover, he regularly writes regularly for various sales points, including National Geographic, Science News, and online, including Medscape and WebMD. The author of Bullet, which is your name, is probably what you will die and what you can do about it, Clerisy Press 2007 and a few books for young readers. Avery began journalism while going to university, writing to the school newspaper and organizing the student’s non -fictional magazine. Although he writes about all fields of science, he is particularly interested in the artificial intelligence he develops, especially when he receives a degree of neuroscience, science of consciousness and philosophy.