Ants raise other insects to eat their meat!

There’s an African species of ant called Melissotarsus insularis (along with 3 other related species) that appears to farm or domesticate other insects to maintain a fresh supply of their meat, as if they were cattle.

These tiny ants live burrowed under tree bark – apparently they even have a pair of legs that point up instead of down, so that they can grip the ceiling of their tunnels as well as the floor.  Various types of armoured scale insects share this habitat with the ants.

These scale insects don’t provide any honeydew for the ants to eat, and they don’t produce edible scale either. So… the  best guess of researcher Scott Schneider at the University of Massachusetts is that the ants eat the scale insects’ meat! It may be that they chose scale insects without a hard, waxy scale on purpose, for easier butchering and consumption.

Nobody’s actually seen an ant chowing down on a scale insect’s flesh yet, but Schneider plans a follow-up experiment to measure stable isotope levels in the ants and use these observations to determine whether they are primarily vegetarian or carnivorous.

If that’s got you all mad science excited, you can read the whole Zoologger story at New Scientist.

Image [another species of Melissotarsus] credit: semant2006