How Do Ants Find Food — Sydney’s student essay
Finding food is an ants most important task as a worker. They have to be able to find enough food not only for themselves to survive but for their queen to survive as well. A worker ant protects and supports the whole colony by going out into the world and finding food to bring home.
In order to find food an ants nest will send out scouting ants to search for food in all different directions, even up to a range of 100 to 200 meters. So the ant marches out in search of food and uses its olfactory cues, otherwise known as their sense of smell. They smell using their antennae, the antennae of ants have hair-like sensilia that contain sensory neurons. They then send a long nerve fiber through the nerve straight to the brain. This provides for the acute smell sense of ants.
This is not something that is just known from birth for these ants they have to be taught from other ants that are older and more experienced than them.
A leader scout will take a willing pupil along with it as it goes out to find food in order to teach how to search. The younger ant will walk behind the teacher stopping from time to time so that the pupil can commit all the landmarks to its memory so it doesn’t get lost out in the big bad world.
When the pupil has committed the landmark to memory and feels it’s ready to move again it taps on its master’s hind legs or abdomen two times and they move along. So this is how they teach the younger pupils how to move around within the world, once they have been taught this they can now go out on their own and perfect their skills to eventually teach other ants, and so the cycle moves on and on.
Once the ants sniff out the food they then look around for whatever food might be in the area and take that back to the nest, as they bring food back they leave a trail behind them so that other worker ants can follow it back to where the food was. That is why you normally see ants I a perfect line when they are walking to and from food, because they are simply following the smelly trail left by the ant that found the food source.
The main ant will now also look for those same landmarks they saw the last time they found the food when they go back to find more. The ant is also very strong when it comes to carrying the food back to the hive. They can carry so much and if they can’t do it on their own other worker ants will then come and help the ant to carry it home, everybody works together as a cohesive group to make sure they get the job done.
So ants sniff around following their noses until they happen upon some food. They have a very strict order of business, everything is in order so that everybody gets feed and the queen stays alive and protected. Everything that an ant does all goes back to protecting the queen so that they can continue their bloodline.