![]() The ability to film ants going about their business in extreme close-up requires specialist equipment – a one-off contraption called Frankencam – or Frank for short. At this point, regular wood-ant queens pursue a high risk strategy, infiltrating a field ant colony and keeping a low profile, but the super colony affords plenty of opportunity for queens to start a new life elsewhere, or just stay at home. The males die almost immediately afterward the females shed their wings and become queens. Once the winged royal family hatch, they fly off and mate. One gets the impression that if he could, Sir David would spend all day lying on the grass, watching ants fight. Meanwhile, the identical, but decidedly less cooperative wood ants on the other side of the mountain are still busy killing each other. These ants, males and females both, will sprout wings.Īfter the larvae hatch, the worker ants head out to collect food, hunting more spiders or farming aphids, which excrete a sticky honeydew that ants love. Their first eggs will produce the next breeding generation – a sort of royal household. Deep in their mounds the queens – up to a million per super colony – start laying. It takes a lot of work to make fascinating television out of what is, essentially, a bunch of ants, but the narrative arc of their breeding habits is indeed extraordinary. They will take down caterpillars, beetles, even butterflies. The super colony, says Attenborough, “makes hundreds of millions of kills every year”. They are quite capable of hunting down a wolf spider, killing it and dragging it back to their nest. Which is not to say these wood ants abjure violence in all its forms. It is a tremendously costly way of doing business, although the winners get to eat the losers.Īttenborough’s ants don’t do that – they are on friendly terms with other nests, and are thus able to form super colonies half a billion ants strong, spread over more than a thousand mounds linked by 100km of trails. ![]() ![]() The ants from a single colony are all related, thanks to their queen mum, and when they meet other wood ants from a neighbouring nest, they go to war, piercing rivals with their mandibles and squirting formic acid into the wounds to dissolve their enemy’s innards. Generally speaking, wood ants like a fight. ![]()
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