“Half million clipper ants take center stage in new insectarium at American Museum of Natural History”

When the American Museum of Natural History in New York recently opened its new insectarium, half a million clipper ants came under the spotlight.

Ants are a marvel of biology, living in huge colonies that function as a single superorganism.

They are sophisticated farmers, collecting leaves which they use to nourish extensive fungal gardens, which provide food for the colony.

Creating the exhibit was a six-year journey that took the museum team, and the ants, from a farm in Trinidad, where a colony the size of a tangerine was collected, to a laboratory in Oregon, where it grew to fill a vat of bathroom, and then a six-day road trip across the US in a rental van.

The ants, which moved into their museum habitat in January, were slow to adjust to their new home, failing to harvest enough leaves to maintain their fungal gardens.

“We’ve had some ups and downs,” said Hazel Davies, a director at the museum.

To showcase ant farming, the museum designed a huge open exhibit made of lab-tested “ant-approved” materials, such as stainless steel braiding and Lego bricks.

“The ants had a chance to pick out a lot of the things,” said Ryan Garrett, the founder of Leaf House Scientific, who collected the colony and offered habitat advice.

The design had ants tending their fungal gardens inside glass spheres, then following an ambitious leaf-gathering route by heading headlong across a transparent skybridge and climbing aluminum poles.

When the ant-filled spheres were loaded into the exhibit, the team anticipated that it would take the ants several days to find their way.

It took them weeks. Some ants quickly made their way to the flyover and even down an ant highway leading to the collection area, but stopped there.

The team needed only a small subset of ants to trace the path; when the first ants returned from the collection area, they left a pheromone trail that the others could follow.

A rope was placed across the bridge so that the ants would not have to cross it headfirst. Another shortcut allowed the ants to get around some of the aluminum poles.

By mid-April, lines of ants had begun carrying leaves back to their spheres.

There is more work to do. The ants have not adapted to the braided metal that showed promise in the lab, and every so often they fall into a pit in the exhibit.

However, the team has now retired the large shortcuts. Recently, the ants finally completed the entire route and even started making their way around a turnoff in an elevated maze.

Por: EMILY ANTHES