Ant and Related Entomology Terms

Referring to a surface bearing multiple impressed lines; striated: Striate rocks or mineral structures in geology have grooves, furrows, or linear markings that have occurred through fault movement.

The production of sound by rubbing one part of the body surface against another part: Alice read in her biology book that stridulation could be heard as a chirping, grating, or hissing which could be created by grasshoppers or crickets by the stroking of their body parts together.

The licking of secretions from the body of another animal: Strigilation always takes place when a mother cat just had her kittens which she "cleaned" with her tongue.

Pertaining to wings reduced in size and less than fully functional; brachypterous: Some insects have subapterous or rudimentary organs of flight.

Referring to a hair that stands at an angle of about 45 degrees from the body surface: The front part of Max's hair just didn't lie flat like the rest, but was quite suberect which turned out to be rather stylish.

A subdivision of a genus: A subgenus can refer to one or more distinctive species of common phylogenetic origin within a genus.

Applied to the condition, or to the group showing it, in which the adults care for their nymphs or larvae for some period: An animal that shows no sociality characteristics or features, but cares only for its young, is said to be subsocial. .

A deep furrow or groove: Such sulci are typically found as grooves in an organ or tissue, like those of the convolutions of the outside part of the brain.

A group of ant nests in which the individual ants are not aggressive towards each other: A unicolonial population, in which workers move freely from one nest to another; so that the entire population is a supercolony..

Any society; such as, the colony of a eusocial insect species, possessing features of organization analogous to the physiological properties of a single organism: Superorganism in the insect colony; for example, is divided into reproductive castes (similar to gonads) and worker castes (like somatic tissue); it may exchange nutrients by trophallaxis (analogous to the circulatory system); and so forth.

A pheromone with an active space restricted so close to the body of the sending organism that direct contact, or something approaching it, must be made with the body in order to perceive the pheromone; A surface pheromone with a chemical secretion, can attract a member of the opposite sex only by the means of the outside part or surface of the sending organism.

Colony reproduction in which one or more queens and a number of workers separate to establish a new colony:Swarming takes place when the queen, or queens, are accompanied by a small number of workers and they leave the main parental nest. This process of swarming is called "budding".

When major portions of the colony separate, each with one or more queens (as in army ants), the process is called "fission".

Swarming also applies to the mass exodus from the nests of reproductive forms at the beginning of the nuptial flight.

An organism that lives in symbiosis (dependent relationship) with another species; symbiote: There are four different ways that symbionts can live with each other: mutualism, commensalism, parasitism, and amensalism. [

The intimate, relatively protracted, dependent relationship of members of one species with those of another species: The three principal kinds of symbiosis are "commensalism", "mutualism", and "parasitism".

A symbiont, in particular a solitary insect or other kind of arthropod, which is accepted to some extent by an insect colony and communicates with it amicably: Most symphiles are licked, fed, or transported to the host brood chambers, or treated to a combination of all three.