Olivia Judson: Ant Communications

Dr. Olivia Judson

OUR last post about an article by the splendidly-evolved Olivia Judson — an evolutionary biologist and a research fellow in biology at Imperial College London — was here: The Romance of Fossils, when she broke our cyber heart by announcing that she’d be gone for six months. But now she’s back!

This article, part of Dr. Judson’s series in the New York Times, is titled: ‘Operator? Can You Put Me Through to Ant Nest 251?’. The bold font was added by us:

Ants of many species have a “stridulatory organ” — a special ridged area of the body which, when rubbed by another part of the body (the “scraper”), makes a squeaky noise. To us, it’s not loud: to hear it without special equipment, you’d need to put your ear right next to a stridulating individual. And most people who study ants think that the animals themselves don’t hear it as a squeak, but as a vibration through a leaf, or a soil particle, or some other solid object.

Thanks to Olivia, your Curmudgeon has learned about stridulation. Let’s read on:

Different species stridulate for different reasons. In some, ants that have become buried will stridulate for help — it’s a kind of “I’m over here, dig me out” announcement. Some do it when they’ve discovered a good patch of food. In at least one European species, stridulations of the queen sound different from those of the workers, and cause the workers to come running to protect her. Play the “royal” sounds from a small loudspeaker, and workers will come running over and stand guard on the loudspeaker.

Dutiful creatures. We continue:

I love all this, for several reasons. First, I like imagining what it would be like to go on a tour of an ant nest — being shrunk down small so that you could walk through the corridors, putting on a special suit so you’d smell right and not get attacked as being an intruder, and listening to the squeaks and stridulations of a world to which we are as alien as a Martian.

We’d like to take that tour with you, Olivia. Perhaps we can stridulate together. Here’s more:

But there’s a bigger point here. We have much to learn about communication in most species. It was only recently discovered, for example, that some species of frog bleep in the ultrasound — the same part of the sound spectrum used by bats, a part of the spectrum that we cannot hear without special gear. Nor is it just animals that communicate.

Who else?

Plants and bacteria do, too. Plants that are under attack from animals release chemicals that appear to cause neighboring plants to alter the composition of their leaves so they are more toxic. Communication among bacteria — well, that’s a huge topic, and one I’ll (probably) come back to. Suffice it to say that chemical conversations between bacteria play a central role in some human diseases.

We’d best start monitoring those conversations! And now we come to the end:

Yet perhaps the biggest point of all is one that is obvious but humbling. We like to think of ourselves as rulers of the planet. But just as an ant cannot hear a nearby piano — a sound that to most of us is so clear that being deaf to it is unimaginable — the planet is full of chatter that we cannot easily detect. For me, reflecting on this makes the planet bigger, somehow, and more mysterious — and reminds me that we humans are aware of just a small part of all that is going on.

There’s more to the article. Click over to the New York Times and read the entire essay. You can’t go wrong with Olivia.

Copyright © 2009. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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