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Mammals Evolved into Ant Eaters 12 Times Since Dinosaur Age, Study Finds
- hammock 1y agoThe weight of all ants on Earth is roughly equal to the weight of all humans- aka there are a lot of ants. And can be found everywhere mammals are able to live. So they make sense as a food source
- ants_everywhere 1y ago> aka there are a lot of ants This is true
- nvader 1y agoAnd easier to predate on at scale than humans.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoI was thinking maybe that's why the evolved stingers, but it turns out ants evolved from stinging wasps not vice versa.
- PNewling 1y agoYour username makes me think you'd be a good person to ask: Sorry, what? (Edit, this sounds like I don't believe you, but it is more that I am in disbelief!) Ants evolved from stinging wasps? Were they flying at that time? Or were wasps at some point non-flying and the 'wasps' grouping is a wide one like 'beetles' is? This is such a fascinating space I know very little about.
- tamad 1y agoI don’t know the answer to your questions off the top of my head, unfortunately, but they are most certainly answered in The Ants by E.O. Wilson. It’s a fascinating and artfully written book. I unfortunately gave my copy to a student, or I’d have found the relevant passage for you. (The biomass fact mentioned in a parent comment is mentioned in the book as well.)
- ants_everywhere 1y agoYeah I was surprised too! I don't actually know that much about ants or biology, but - (1) ants fly! well they don't usually fly, but they spread wings and fly during a "nuptual flight" to start new colonies [0]. I only learned this a few years ago when I moved into the woods and mass migrations of flying ants often. From what I can see, all wasps fly, and I can't find anything saying their common ancestor couldn't fly. So since ants can partially fly, I think it's much more likely they evolved from a flying ancestor. They just lost lost the ability to fly most of the time and totally dominated the land niche. Incidentally, living in the woods has also taught me that there are a variety of wasps that live underground like ants do. I used to think they all built open-air hives. - (2) I made that comment mostly based on a paper [1] I found while googling around. According to the paper: > The stinging wasps (Hymenoptera: Aculeata) are an extremely diverse lineage of hymenopteran insects, encompassing over 70,000 described species.... The most well-studied lineages of Aculeata are the ants... and the bees This is consistent with what I've seen on Wikipedia. Basically ants, bees, and wasps are very closely related. The Wikipedia page on Aculeata [2] has a nice family tree that includes sawflies, bees, and wasps. So yes, wasps is wide like beetles. But there are more beetles. Beetles get their own order, whereas stinging wasps, bees, and ants have an "infraorder", which I guess is like an order but smaller. The Wikipedia article on Hymenoptera has a family tree that shows the relationship with beetles [3]. [0] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/when-why-winged-ants-swarm-nuptial-flight.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/when-why-winged-ants-swarm-nu... [1] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)30325-1 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aculeata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aculeata [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera
- jbotz 1y agoYes, ants evolved from wasps, and it's really not that surprising if you take a close look at a typical ant and a typical wasp, pretty much the only difference are wings and coloring. There also exist wingless wasps, and some of them are black and really quite indistinguishable from ants by non-entomologist. And that's after over 100 million years since the ants diverged from the wasps! Talk about a successful evolutionary design. Your closest relative from 100 million years ago was a little vaguely rat-like thing. (Edit to answer your specific question: the ancestor of ants and wasps obviously was winged and flying, since both families still have at least some winged members). As a sibling has already pointed out ants do fly during "nuptial flight", and then discard their wings... wings would only be a hindrance for their largely underground lifestyle. Also ants have retained the stinger which also functions as an ovipositor (egg layer), and some species still use it for defense and pack a wallop of a poison, right up there with some of the of the worst wasps. Google "bullet ant" for some good stuff. Other ants just bite, and the burning you feel is from their saliva which consists mostly of an acid named after ants: fourmic acid (ant is "formica" in latin). Edit to add one more random factoid that will surprise a lot of people: termites are not related to ants at all, and they evolved from... (drumroll)... cockroaches! It's rather harder to see the resemblance, except for their diet... both are capable of digesting (with help from endosymbiotic microbes) pure cellulose. And while termites don't really resemble ants either, parallel evolution has chosen the same strategy of retaining the wings for the fertile individuals who go on a nuptial flight and then discard their wings and try to found new colonies.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fireattack 1y agoYou mean "i.e." I believe
- jbotz 1y agoWhile comparing things... a colony of leaf-cutter ants (which form some of the largest colonies with as many as 2 million individuals when the colony is mature) has roughly the same metabolic rate as cow (easily measured from the CO2 at the exits of their nest). So don't think of ants as tiny animals, think of ant colonies as fairly large animals.
- veunes 1y agoFrom an evolutionary standpoint, it totally makes sense to adapt around that buffet
- fnordsensei 1y agoWe should be eating more ants, it seems like a largely untapped source of protein then.
- Scaevolus 1y agoant biomass is estimated to be 20% of human biomass, so it's remarkably close https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2201550119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2201550119
- perdomon 1y agoYou may not like it, but this is what peak mammalian performance looks like.
- PlunderBunny 1y agoAnt eater pickup line.
- chrisweekly 1y ago[flagged]
- kittensmittens 1y ago[flagged]
- chrisweekly 1y agowow, was that a misplaced and unnecessary barb. srsly, granted I didn't add a ton of value to the thread, but if a simple gesture of gratitude for a needed moment of human levity results in downvotes and attempts at judgy put-downs, something's wrong here. please look at my comment history before deciding who belongs on what forum. I love this place and will accept whatever further karma hits come for mentioning karma in addressing this incivility.
- bee_rider 1y agoI think it is just tradition (as on many sites) to downvote comments about karma. Telling you to go to reddit was rude though.
- chrisweekly 1y agothanks, yeah, I know -- and yes, agreed.
- harimau777 1y agoAt the end of all things, when evolution has reached its inevitable end, all that will be left is a war between ant eaters and crabs.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoAnt eating crabs.
- washadjeffmad 1y agoCrab eating ants. We'll kill the ones that eat us and eat the ones we kill.
- znyboy 1y agoCrabs are already quite susceptible to ants, due to ants being small enough to swarm and attack the joints and gaps of the crab's carapace.
- account-5 1y agoI think cockroaches might have something to say about this.
- cloudbonsai 1y ago
- TMWNN 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-F1L8XfTrI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-F1L8XfTrI
- Qem 1y agoDid any anteater dinosaurs exist before that?
- juancn 1y agoA bit like [carcinisation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation) for crustaceans
- icambron 1y agoAnother one is, believe it or not, trees: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/ https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
- o11c 1y agoTrees really aren't a good example of convergent evolution. The evidence tends more toward "all plants have woodiness genes, and sometimes those genes can be activated/deactivated". Fruits are, though.
- anticensor 1y agoAnd then you have trenacisation for transportation systems.
- bokchop 1y agoI can see the shear abundance of ants tilting the scale of evolution's nonlinearity. Reminds me of Mitch Hedberg, ~"[Ants are] great if you're ever really hungry and want to eat 2000 of something."
- konstantinua00 1y agohow many times things evolved into sharks? ichtiozaur, dolphin/orca anything else?
- ethan_smith 1y agoBeyond ichthyosaurs and cetaceans, carcharhinification (shark-like convergent evolution) also occurred in plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, certain teleost fish like barracuda, and even the extinct thalattosuchian crocodylomorphs.
- adrian_b 1y agoJurassic-Cretaceous marine crocodiles (like also ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs) looked like sharks, i.e. they depended mostly on their caudal fin for swimming. On the other hand, there was no resemblance between sharks and plesiosaurs or pliosaurs. The latter swimmed using their lateral fins, somewhat like marine turtles and penguins, not like sharks. Also the dentition of plesiosaurs and pliosaurs had no similarity to sharks, so except for being big predators there were no resemblances between them.
- bee_rider 1y agoI guess we’ll see if they have the endurance. Sharks have been around for a while after all. But, Orca have surpassed sharks in terms of badassery, right? And it isn’t that close. They aren’t evolving into sharks, they are the upgrade!
- adrian_b 1y agoThe mosasaurs also developed a caudal fin (vertical, like sharks and ichthyosaurs, not horizontal like whales and dolphins) and eventually they became quite shark-like, though not as fish-like as ichthyosaurs. Between ichthyosaurs (who evolved in Triassic) and mosasaurs (who evolved in Cretaceous) there existed also a group of marine crocodiles (Metriorhynchidae; who evolved in Jurassic), which also had caudal fins and were quite shark-like. So there have been at least 4 groups of amniotes that looked like sharks, cetaceans among mammals and at least 3 groups of diapsids. However all these marine predators looked like sharks from the point of view of locomotion, but none of them had the kind of teeth specialized for cutting that are characteristic for sharks. Teeth resembling those of sharks are found only among some other fish, e.g. piranhas, whose bodies do not resemble sharks.
- conradev 1y agoan aardwolf can hunt up to 300,000 in a single night That’s a new one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardwolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardwolf
- andrewstuart 1y agoThings evolve to eat delicious things.
- doodlebugging 1y agoIf you take Woody Guthrie's old story about rabbits hiding from the dogs [0] and change rabbits to ants and dogs to mammals you have the evolutionary tale of the ant. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO9DYVRUT58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO9DYVRUT58
- michaelhoney 1y agoTop-shelf HN thread! So far I have learned: - the evolved 12-times thing - ants are descended from wasps - insectivorous aardwolves what a day
- veunes 1y agoNow I can't stop picturing a wasp slowly turning into an ant
- veunes 1y agoKind of wild to think that ants and termites became so successful post-dinosaurs that mammals just kept re-inventing themselves to eat them
- tim333 1y agoI sometimes think how AI will change things on evolutionary time scales. We've had hundreds of millions of years of evolving reproducing DNA coming up with different body types being the main thing going on on earth and now we'll have a new digital life like thing going forward.