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When they first emerge as adults, minors’ antennae and mouth
muscles are weak. I guess they didn’t get much of a workout in
their childhoods, sitting still snarfling down every scrap of food
they could get their mouths around. Too weak to forage or feed
their sisters, these youngest workers mostly wander around,
getting their sea legs.
As they get older and learn the ropes a bit, minors start to pitch
in, nursing their baby sisters with food their older sisters bring
home and taking out the trash every now and then. In the sunset
of their lives, they finally venture out of the nest, searching for
food and defending the nest from intruders.
Something wonderful happens to big headed ant minors as they
begin their foray into the outside world. Their brains change. Ants
don’t need to know a whole lot when they’re wandering around in
the darkness of the nest. Feed this, clean that. But once they step
outside, whoa! Information overload! Outside the nest, ants need
to remember. What does my nestmate smell like? How did I get
here? How do I get home? Where do my enemies live?
It might seem like a pretty steep learning curve, but big headed
ant minors have it all worked out. As they age, these ants’ brains
change to help them remember things. Chemicals in their bodies
re-wire to help them forage better, and their brains (not their
heads, but their brains), particularly the parts where they store
their memories, called mushroom bodies, get much, much bigger.
School of Ants Map - Big Headed Ant
North American distribution of the big headed ant (Pheidole tysoni).
Visit www.schoolofants.org/species/136 for an interactive version.
All the better to organize and store that information avalanche
when they begin moving around the outside world.
Getting the Big Head
So Gregory’s not really adopted. Final proof came for me at the
birth of Greg’s niece, Caroline, a miniature replica of my husband,
down to her wide blue water-drop eyes and plump bottom lip.
And big headed ant minors didn’t adopt their broad-crowned
sisters. They formed them, working within their splendid system,
the elegant interplay of environment and chemicals and tissues,
the resulting dance of living creatures in a living world, perfectly
configured elements of nature. No fried chicken dinners needed.
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