Ant and Related Entomology Terms

In anatomy, the third, posterior most major division of the body; belly, tummy: The abdomen is that part of a person's body between the thorax and the pelvis, but not including the back

Finely striate (thin, narrow groove or channel), as if scratched by a needle: Sandy viewed the aciculate spines of the plant that the botany teacher showed the students in class.

In zoology, rare,In formicine ants, the circular exit of the poison gland formed by the margin of the terminal gastral sternite: In class, the students learned about the acidopores being conical structures involving a small opening at the posterior or end of an ant's gaster.

The space within which the concentration of a pheromone (or any other behaviorally active substance) is at or above threshold concentration: The active space of a pheromone is, in fact, the signal itself, for example the signals of light and sound.

A reference to the Aculeata with a stinger or barb: Hymenoptera, a group including the bees, ants, and many of the wasps, are aculeate insects.

Referring to something that tapers to a fine point: Little Sally's mother told her to be very careful of the long, slender, and acuminate pins that she used for sewing.

Programed schedules of individual birth, growth, and death of ants: Adaptive demography involves the frequency and distributions of age and size in the worker caste that promote survival and reproduction of the ant colony as a whole.

The process of evolution by which species multiply and diverge into different niches: Adaptive radiation can be exemplified by species that are predators on different kinds of prey, and come to occupy the same, or at any rate the overlapping ranges.

A secretion presented by a social parasite that induces the host insects to accept the parasite as a member of their ant colony: An adoption substance is a discharge that is emitted from an insect to incite an ant community to accept it as a part of the group.

The carrying or dragging of one adult social insect by a nest mate, usually during colony emigrations: In ants, adult transport is a very frequent and stereotypical form of behavior.

Adventitious refers to something that is added from an outside and often unexpected source rather than being an intrinsic element: Adventitious ant shelters involve incidental or adventitious ant-nest sites that are associated by chance and are not an integral part of plants.

Such incidental nest sites can be divided into convenient categories as follows:

1. Preformed cavities in live branches and stems, excavated by wood-boring beetles and other insects and then later occupied by ant colonies.
2. Cavities in stems and branches that are naturally hollow or contain a pith soft enough to be easily excavated by ants which includes grasses, sedges, composites, and other herbaceous and shrubby plant forms and so a great variety of ants occupy them.
3. Natural or preformed cavities in the bark of trees; such as, pine trees in the southern United States that shelter an entire fauna of ant genera that nest adventitiously in the bark.
4. Roots of epiphytes or the tangled root systems of orchids, gesneriads (mostly tropical herbs or shrubs), and other tropical epiphytes are ideal nest sites for ants.
5. Galls (abnormal swelling of plant tissue) formed by cynipid wasp larvae, or Cynipidae, a family of gall wasps, hymenopteran insects in the super-family Cynipoidea that produce galls on oaks, which have been observed in Europe and North America.
6. Earthen or carton nests constructed vertically against the sunken portions of tree trunks by a few ant species in the New World tropics because the trees provide a partial wall of solid wood which provides some protection for the ant colonies.

None of these diverse structures appears to be "designed" to accommodate ant colonies and all of them are ordinary anatomical features of the plants that the ants exploit, apparently in a unilateral manner.

In contrast, the domatia do appear to serve as ant nests because they are featured by cavities that form independently of the ants.

So, it is adventitious when roots and tubercles absorb nutrients from waste material carried onto the cavities, and even holes or thin windows of tissue through which ants can more conveniently enter and leave their colonies are essentially provided naturally by the plants, but not to entice ants as with the domatia.

The regular changing of labor roles by colony members as they age: Susan read in an article that age polyethism referred to the modification of labor roles of ants taking place on a regular basis due to ageing ants.

A group of individuals, comprising more than just a mated pair or a family: An aggregation refers to single life forms that have gathered in the same place but do not construct nests or rear offspring in a cooperative manner in comparison to a colony.

A chemical substance exchanged among members of the same species that induces a state of alertness or alarm in the face of a common threat: Jeff read about thealarm pheromone referring to the release or ejection of a certain substance to alert the others of the same species of an oncoming danger, threat, or attack.

Protective behavior which also functions as an alarm signaling device within the colony: Examples of alarm-defense systems include the use of chemical defensive secretions by certain ant species that double as alarm pheromones.