National Harbor, Md. — Looking at face patterns in photos of more than 11,000 kinds of ants struck entomologist Clint Penick as a fine pandemic-lockdown project for his students.
Most ants have a smooth outer surface, or cuticle. But some grow elaborate patterns, such as tiny indentations “like dimples on a golf ball” or netted patterns like “cracks in mud,” says Penick, who started the project while at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Ant taxonomists use more than 150 terms to describe the different cuticle patterns, with different names for some subtle distinctions. “They drive people like me crazy,” he says.
Mapping face textures onto an evolutionary tree of ant genera suggests that modern ant lineages must have evolved from smooth-faced ancestors, reported Penick and his former grad student John Paul Hellenbrand, now at the City University of New York, in April in Myrmecological News. Since ants first emerged some 160 million to 140 million years ago near the beginning of the Cretaceous Period, various face textures have appeared, disappeared and sometimes reappeared. The multiple origins got the researchers wondering if the patterns could be of use to the insects instead of just random biological happenstance.
Textures that look the same, however, might not yield the same benefit in different species, cautions evolutionary morphologist Brendon Boudinot of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
2024-01-02 08:00:00
Original from www.sciencenews.org
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