Tantive IV vs The Devastator

magalomania:

Scientist Mohamed Babu from Mysore, India captured beautiful photos of these translucent ants eating a specially colored liquid sugar. Some of the ants would even move between the food resulting in new color combinations in their stomachs. Read more over on the Daily Mail. (via notcot) (via thisiscolossal)

I did my own version of this with acorn ants (Temnothorax curvispinosus) for a thesis in my Behavioral Ecology course. I wanted to see how worker ants allocate their sources of sugar and protein. I dyed their sugar source (honey) red and their protein (mashed up fruit flies) blue. I also wanted to study their recruitment foraging methods by means of a teachable technique known as tandem running. In tandem running, one worker leads another worker to the discovered food source by constantly touching the other with her antennae. Anyway, I discovered that the workers feed almost entirely off the honey, as their abdomens were bright red, and that they collected the blue protein and fed it exclusively to the larvae back in the nest!