I'm Adrian Smith, I'm a biologist at the
North Carolina Museum Natural Sciences
and NC State and I'm going to be talking
to a couple teens today about my new
research on ant larvae.
We're going to three, two, one, clap.
Oh, yeah! You have to do the hands...
Hannah. Yes. let me show you this.
Have you ever seen an ant that looks like that?
No, that is disgusting. Yeah, so believe it or
not that is an ant. That is so creepy.
This is a picture from my new study and
it's a study describing the
developmental stages of an ant,
of three species of ants actually.
We did this study because there are like 16,000
described species of ants. Like ants that have a name, right.
We only know how many
developmental stages an ant goes through
before it becomes an adult for about
sixty of those. So less than half of a
percent. So what we did to actually do
the study was make images like that it's
a scanning electron microscope image to
sort of figure out if there's certain
body parts on larvae that distinguish
developmental stages from each other.
Very cool.
Okay, so here we go. Oh my god.
Yeah! So that, believe it or not, is larvae
hatching from an egg. So we start with
the egg and then we hatch into this.
So, this is the first instar larvae.
We call all the developmental stages instars.
What we found is they're actually three stages
of larval development, so there's three
instars. So, this is a second instar the
second stage of larval development.
It looks sort of like the first but there's
more complex hairs. So all these
little spires sticking out are hairs, and
here's what those hairs look like up close.
Oh wow, they're really wrinkly.
At this stage of development do they...
what are they doing? Are they just sitting there
and growing or until they do a do they move around or something?
Yeah, so they are
growing and they're eating.
So larvae are the one things in an ant colony
that can eat solid food.
They actually get their food placed like right
on their stomach and then they just bend
their neck and just
start eating it right off their bodies.
That is so gross, it's really cool though.
One of the cool things that we
describe for the first time is actually
in the first and second instar,
those things on its back are,
the term that's actually in the
scientific literature is "sticky doorknobs"
So are they like a
gripping mechanism of some sort?
Yeah, exactly.
Wow. Here's a close-up of it.
They almost look suction cup and shaped like
and that's probably the purpose then.
Yeah, exactly. The adult ants will
actually take and pick up these larvae
and stick them to the walls and ceilings
of the nest and they'll actually just like suspend them.
That's crazy. They lose the sticky
doorknobs at the third stage.
The larvae sort of stretch out, they lay all the way flat
and then they get buried by their
nest mate workers. So the thing stretched
out, it's buried, and then what it does is
it starts weaving a cocoon. Seriously?
Yeah, yeah. I had no idea ants went through all this.
Yeah, they actually produce silk. So they'll
actually produce silk and weave a cocoon.
So here's a close-up of
what that looks like. This is ant silk
Whoa, so like is an ant inside of one
of these something? Yeah, exactly
that's what it looks like inside of it.
That's so creepy! It looks like a snake
is taking off his skin but it's...
So that's when they switch
from that that sort of larval form
to an actual thing that
might start looking like an ant.
Oh, wow. This is like the nicest
and coolest pictures I've ever seen of ants!
Yeah!
So, that's sort of what
we found. Okay. But then I also try to
think about like how is this sort of
work, this basic biology, this
descriptive biology, important for
society at large. That's what I wanted
to ask you. Okay. What do you think?
I mean, we see ants on like a
daily basis. For most part they live
pretty much in our habitat in a way. So I
think being able to know so much about
an animal that like you don't have to go
somewhere special to see, is pretty
interesting for me. You know up close
they look beautiful really, I think.
Overall it would promote like um
appreciation for these amazing things in
the natural world.
I see like looking through pictures of
ants to be extremely interesting
and it makes people who haven't like
learned about this stuff very...
like they would be interested as well
and then they want to be more interested
in stuff pertaining to science and let
us have more scientists, which will let
us have a better capability of life,
I guess. Awesome, this is great thanks for
talking to me about this stuff. Thank you for asking
me. Yeah, cool, I think we're done.