Ants!

You have been spending a lot of time in your backyard. You have noticed that there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of ants scurrying around every time you are out there. You are amazed at how interesting these creatures appear to be. You decide to do some research on ants. You have found two articles about this topic.

 

After you have looked at these sources, you will answer ONE question about them. Briefly scan the sources and the questions that follow. Then, go back and read the sources carefully so you will have the information you need to answer the questions and finalize your research. 

 

 

Directions for Beginning:

You will now look at two sources. You can go back to both of the sources as often as you like.

 

Research Questions:

After looking at the sources, use the rest of the time in Part 1 to answer question(s) about them. Your answers will be scored.

 

Part 1

 

Sources for Performance Task:

 

Source #1

This article from Appleseeds magazine is about a scientist who studies ants.

 

An Eye for Ants

by Gretchen Noyes-Hull

 

Dr. Edward O. Wilson, scientist and teacher, has spent his life peeking into the nests of ants. He's curious about the job of each ant in the colony. He wants to uncover the secrets of any colonies' success.

 

As a child, Edward was often alone. . . . Wherever he lived, snakes, fish, and insects became his friends. For a time, he even kept a colony of harvester ants in a jar under his bed.

 

The summer he was 7, Edward hurt his right eye in a fishing accident. As he says: "The attention of my surviving eye turned to the ground." It wasn't long before Edward decided to become an entomologist—a scientist who studies insects.

 

Ants live almost everywhere—from tropical climates to beyond the Arctic Circle, from dry deserts to shady rain forests, from city sidewalks to wild woodlands, and from deep in the ground to the tops of the tallest trees. They live in colonies. An ant colony can have as many as 20 million members.

 

There is only one queen ant in a colony. It's the queen's task to lay the eggs. Out of the eggs grow worker ants and sometimes a new queen. Every ant in a colony has a job. The main goal of all the worker ants is to take care of the queen and her offspring. This they do in some amazing ways.

 

For 50 years, Dr. Wilson has traveled around the world looking for new kinds of ants. Sometimes he brings entire colonies back to his laboratory to observe them more closely. He wants to learn about each ant's job within its colony. He wants to know how each ant's job contributes to the future survival of its species.

 

Dr. Wilson's discoveries help us understand why many animal species develop social organization. In a social organization, each member of the group has a specific job. Each job is important to the entire species' success.

 

Whenever possible, Dr. Wilson still returns to the place where he first watched ants. He notes the changes in ant species that have occurred over the past 60 years. And today he still relies on the observations and collections of the specimens that he made when he was a young boy.

 

An Ant Experiment to Try

Worker ants must build, feed, and guard their colony. To do this, they need to communicate with each other. Like most living things, ants depend on chemical odors (known as pheromones) to send messages, such as, "I found food over here . . . alert! there's a stranger in here." Over the years, Dr. Wilson has carried out hundreds of experiments to find the meanings of these odor signals. Although he's made important discoveries, many mysteries remain.

 

You can do an experiment to test the odor signals of ants. Put several drops of sugar water on a piece of paper. Place the paper near some ants. Watch as one ant discovers the food. Other ants will soon follow the first ant's odor trail. Turn the paper sideways. The ants will still follow the scent of the odor trail, although the sugar water is now in a different place.

 

Amazing Ant Facts

There are almost 10,000 known species of ants and many more remaining to be discovered. At any one time, 10 million billion (that's 10,000,000,000,000,000) ants are alive. (The world's population of humans is only about 6.6 billion!)

 

Most ants are scavengers. They find food outside the nest. But some kinds of ants actually "farm" their food. Some "farming" ants grow fungus on underground leaf farms. . . .

 

Some ants drop pebbles down other colonies' holes. The pebbles block the other ants and keep them from going after the same food.

 

Some worker ants act like storage containers. They fill themselves up with food like a balloon. If food becomes scarce, they regurgitate it for the rest of the colony. (Regurgitate is the scientific way to say "throw up.")

 

 

“An Eye for Ants” by Gretchen  Noyes-Hull, from Appleseeds. Copyright © 2007 by Epals Media. Reprinted by permission of Cobblestone Publishing Company.

 

Source #2

This source is about what happens inside an ant colony.

 

Life in an Ant Colony

 

You can find an ant almost anywhere in the world. You will know it is an ant by the six tiny legs, the skinny body in three parts, the bent antennae, and the strong chewing parts. It will be brown, red, yellow, or black.

 

Ants like to live in the tropics best, but they live on every continent except Antarctica. There are so many ants in the world that if you piled them together, they would weigh about as much as all the people on Earth.

 

As small as ants are, they are very tough. Many ants bite, and some sting. An ant can carry up to 100 times its own body weight. That is like a child picking up a car! But ants are also strong in another way, and that is in working together in big groups in order to survive. Ant nests are a great example.

Many ants build nests. These ants build nests on the ground, inside logs, under stones, and in trees. They often use wood, leaves, or soil to build nests. Some ant colonies are small enough to nest inside an acorn. Other nests rise above the earth in large mounds. Some colonies extend for a mile or more underground.

 

Most ant nests have layers of chambers with tunnels to connect them. Most nests also have nurseries where eggs hatch and workers care for young ants.