Thursday, May 21, 2009

Ant Stinger Family Tree

Here's a terrific little article about the stingers in ants, complete with a family tree. Ants apparently evolved from the wasps, and the evolutionary trend is to lose the stingers altogether. Common pests like fire ants seem to still have their stingers primarily to combat vertebrates, not other insects.

2 comments:

Ronaldo said...

"Ants apparently evolved from the wasps, and the evolutionary trend is ...."

But apparently not the Martialis heureka ant.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/
2008/09/13/0806187105.abstract

Ronaldo said...

I'd be more than happy to replace "apparently" in my first comment to "maybe."