View allAll Photos Tagged weaverant
You missed a great musical opportunity there, Leonard C.!
These green ants, and many others, were using a length of fencing wire as a handy highway. All I needed to do was wait beside Rusty Staple Junction for a few shots.
animal, fauna, wildlife, ant, weaver, weaver ant, asian weaver ant, red weaver ant, oecophylla, oecophylla smaragdina, leaf nest, nest, perak, malaysia, asia, august 2021
A nest of ants made of palm leaves (detail).
Singapore.
Regnum: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Classis: Insecta
Divisio: ?
Ordo: Hymenoptera
Familia: Formicidae
Genus: Oecophylla
Red Alert!
Weaver Ants (Oecophylla smaragdina)
Also know as: Kerengga, Green Ant, Red Ants.
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Subclass: Pterygota
Infraclass: Neoptera
Superorder: Endopterygota
Order: Hymenoptera
Ferocious red ants (very common in Kerala). Caught them running back and forth on a clothesline. This one didn't like the lens being pointed at it ...
People must learn about teamwork, collaboration and perfect coordination from these ants. These Weaver ants are holding together leaves that are hundreds of times their own weight. While all their 6 legs hold on to one leaf on which they stand, their jaws brings closer the rim of other leaf that has to be woven. They stick like little staples till the white sticky fiber is able to hold the leaves by itself.
Weaver Ants are those ants with reddish long bodies and very long legs that construct their nests by getting leaves together neatly. Multiple leaves are held together with the white fibers. Queen ant lays eggs on surface of these leaves internally and the pupa grows up in the shady cool place. This is how the weaver ant's nest looks like. This is a smaller specimen with two or three leaves woven together, but there are larger ones where four or more leaves are also strung together.
The ants do not have silk, but their larva does. However, larva cannot move around. So, the worker ants carry larva around and the little one spins enough silk to keep the leaves together as a house.
Oecophylla smaragdina is widespread in the Old World tropics and are present the most sophisticated nest-building activities of all weaver ants.The weaver ant (O. smaragdina) is a dominant canopy ant in tropical India and Australasia with colonies of up to 500 000 ants housed in nests made of leaves fastened together by larval silk and scattered across tens of trees. Workers draw leaves together, often forming long chains, and glue them together with larval silk. The colonies are very large and highly polydomous. Queens are pre-dominantly though not exclusively once-mated and colonies are usually single-queened, but most Northern Territory (Australia) colonies are polygynous. The workers are highly polymorphic (seen also in a fossilized colony), show complex polyethism, and present a much-studied rich pheromonal repertoire for the colony's tasks. Colony odor is partly learned, showing a "nasty neighbor" effect in reactions to other colonies of this highly territorial ant, and partly intrinsic to each individual. The odor varies over time and differs between the nests of a colony. Not surprisingly, Oecophylla ants are hosts to a variety of inquilines, such as spiders, which mimic the colony odor to escape detection. In addition, a constellation of Homoptera benefit from ant protection, yet the activities of the ants in controlling pest species make these ants beneficial insects (they are also human food in some areas) (adapted from Crozier et al., 2010). Reference: taxo4254.wikispaces.com/Oecophylla+smaragdina
Chatuchak Park / Bangkok / Thailand
Original size; www.flickr.com/photos/rushen/8484378234/sizes/o/in/photos...
Prachuap Khiri Khan, Thailand--This weaver ant is pulling two leaves together in order to build a nest. Larvae are then carried from the nest and are squeezed to produce larval silk which is used as a cement to glue the leaves together.
weaver ants in coordinated effort to carry off some goodie they've found.
The hi-res version of this image is available for purchase at
Apparently you can eat if hungry. With an abdomen full of defensive formic acid I reckon I'd wanna be bloody starving. Heard an old story of aboriginal women licking the abdomen to firm up their thighs and breasts. Birds also sometimes use the acid to kill parasites like lice & ticks as well as fungi in their feathers. They pick up an ant in their beak and run it over their plumage.
A weaver ant (Oecophylla smaragdina) carries a spider leg back to its nest in Angkor, Cambodia (June 2012)
A queen weaver ant threatening to bite me while I photographer her and her new colony. You will see pupae of different stages of development in this set. More tropical ants: orionmystery.blogspot.com/2012/04/tropical-ants.html
animal, fauna, wildlife, ant, weaver, weaver ant, asian weaver ant, red weaver ant, oecophylla, oecophylla smaragdina, leaf nest, nest, perak, malaysia, asia, august 2021
Green ants (genus Oecophylla) are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae (order Hymenoptera). Weaver ants are obligately arboreal and are known for their unique nest building behaviour where workers construct nests by weaving together leaves using larval silk.
Weaver Ants are those ants with reddish long bodies and very long legs that construct their nests by getting leaves together neatly. Multiple leaves are held together with the white fibers. Queen ant lays eggs on surface of these leaves internally and the pupa grows up in the shady cool place. This is how the weaver ant's nest looks like. This is a smaller specimen with two or three leaves woven together, but there are larger ones where four or more leaves are also strung together.
The ants do not have silk, but their larva does. However, larva cannot move around. So, the worker ants carry larva around and the little one spins enough silk to keep the leaves together as a house.
Oecophylla smaragdina is widespread in the Old World tropics and are present the most sophisticated nest-building activities of all weaver ants.The weaver ant (O. smaragdina) is a dominant canopy ant in tropical India and Australasia with colonies of up to 500 000 ants housed in nests made of leaves fastened together by larval silk and scattered across tens of trees. Workers draw leaves together, often forming long chains, and glue them together with larval silk. The colonies are very large and highly polydomous. Queens are pre-dominantly though not exclusively once-mated and colonies are usually single-queened, but most Northern Territory (Australia) colonies are polygynous. The workers are highly polymorphic (seen also in a fossilized colony), show complex polyethism, and present a much-studied rich pheromonal repertoire for the colony's tasks. Colony odor is partly learned, showing a "nasty neighbor" effect in reactions to other colonies of this highly territorial ant, and partly intrinsic to each individual. The odor varies over time and differs between the nests of a colony. Not surprisingly, Oecophylla ants are hosts to a variety of inquilines, such as spiders, which mimic the colony odor to escape detection. In addition, a constellation of Homoptera benefit from ant protection, yet the activities of the ants in controlling pest species make these ants beneficial insects (they are also human food in some areas) (adapted from Crozier et al., 2010). Reference: taxo4254.wikispaces.com/Oecophylla+smaragdina