Where ants come from?

May 27, 2017 • 3:17 PM UTC

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Microorganisms

Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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I am often perplexed with how many ants I have in my house. If someone could dissolve the whole house but the ants; I think you will still see a skeleton of my house made out of ants. Anyway, I love ants – so I have no problem. My family, not so much. So while I try to save them from ant poison, I have been exploring where is the mother ship for these little workers under the house. To my great surprise, I found a tiny portion of the mother ship in rotting wood. Here is a quick video of what the wood looks like, and the first time I found some eggs.

And while I invaded the domain, a few of them tried to run away with these eggs in the mouth. On close examination under foldscope (time lapse imaging); I found a beautiful surprise. Take a look yourself.

Now, I am collecting a full day time lapse data on these eggs, to see if I can catch some development action; so I will update this saga shortly.
cheers
manu
Update 1: as an update, here is a 3hr time lapse. As you can see (if you play it really fast); desiccation is reducing the eggs (making them smaller). This is 2.5hr long data set, collected at 1 frame per minute.

More data sets coming soon. I should make the area humid to avoid any evaporation.
Update 2: as you can notice in time lapse above – we can clearly see the eggs shrink in because of loss of water. This is because of desiccation; and the eggs are drying just sitting under the slide.

So I rigged up (see above) a way to increase humidity around a foldscope; using wet paper towels. I now have a 4hr data set and another one running over night. Will know tomorrow what happens to the egg 🙂
Update: 3
Finally, I got 11hrs of time lapse data watching a single ant egg under a foldscope. See the video for yourself; with 1 picture taken every minute; played back at 20frames per second. So in one second of this movie; almost 20 min have passed by 🙂

Now to my disappointment, I don’t see too much activity inside the egg. I was able to significantly reduce evaporation – but in the end; you do see some shrinkage of the egg size.
Now, this has me all puzzled; and I started to wonder – what if the egg is not fertilized at all. And that’s when I remembered – some ant species do use extra underutilized egs as food. So just by chance, the clutch that I picked might not have been fertilized. How fascinating; eggs as food. Does that remind you of something 🙂
I also have many larvae, and will see if I can catch a larvae eating an egg.
I will continue this quest – since have a significant number of eggs to go through.
Happy exploring.
Manu
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