Corona time isolation was quite a boring time for many.
What would I do today? Maybe I’ll walk around the living room. With a tape measure. With controlled and rhythmic steps, we measure that our living cube is five point seven meters long and three point four meters wide.
So what should we measure next? Look, there’s an ant on that floor. But where is my microscope?
Come on, don’t twiddle it between your fingers. This is science. You have a hairy face.
Representatives of a genus of ants have a striking furrow pattern on their faces.
Somewhat I guess that’s how the entomologist proceeded Chris Penickin a project to measure the facial shapes of ants during the pandemic.
Lacking anything better, Penick and his students took 11,000 high-precision photographs of different ants and studied how their head shapes and grooves differed.
Some ants have a smooth chin, some have more hair. There is no razor in the anthill, not even a common one to share among the workers.
Ants also have various bumps and humps on their heads, which Penick broadly divided into five categories. The ancestor of ants must have had a smooth rump, which evolution has then carved into different shapes and protrusions for different species.
Utter the ant’s life is hard and the hard toil draws deep furrows on the worker’s face.
Some PolyrhachusThe ants of the genus have quite deep and symmetrical furrows on their faces.
The researchers thought that the pattern might protect against chafing and, on the other hand, bacteria. When the grooves are even smaller than a grain of sand, the soil containing microbes cannot come into contact with the ant hive.
in the Sahara in live silver ants ( Cataglyphis ) is, on the other hand, a handsome man. The back of desert ants is completely covered with hair.
The very thin and dense hair reflects the radiation of the harsh desert sun and makes the little ant shimmer silver.
The hair therefore cools the ant, whose job description is to scurry around in a furnace of more than 50 degrees looking for food for other insects that have sunk in the midday heat.