The earliest ants may have been primed for a highly social life — 100 million years ago, the insects had antennae tuned to key communication functions.
All ants live in advanced societies where adults live in large groups and engage in cooperative parenting and divisions of labor, but ants’ ancestors were solitary wasps. Researchers aren’t sure when the insects’ social lifestyle evolved. Some early ants have been found fossilized as groups, which hinted at social living around the time of the insects’ evolution during the Early Cretaceous Period.
Ryo Taniguchi, a paleontologist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, and colleagues examined three fossilized ants of one of the oldest known ant species,. The fossils, preserved in amber, were unearthed in northern Myanmar and are now owned by the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Today, many ant species create massive colonies thousands to millions strong, but the researchers argue that the fossil record suggests that the earliest ants lived in very small colonies of a few dozen nestmates. Despite this, “we can consider that ants lived in a highly advanced social system even in their early evolutionary stages,” Taniguchi says.
The new findings suggest that tens of millions of years before they became an ecological force in ecosystems around the world, ants may have been marching together.
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