New post added at News Channel 365 - Why ants are NYC’s unsung heroesSource: grist.org - Saturday, December 06, 2014 When you’re crammed into a city with a couple million other people, it’s easy to lose sight of the small things. And when I say “small things,” I mean, specifically, ants. A recent census of New York’s smaller residents turned up 42 different species of ants all over the island of Manhattan — and that’s likely only the beginning. From the New York Times : [Lead researcher Amy Savage] and her colleagues sampled 32 sites north of 59th Street in Manhattan, including urban parks, forests found within parks and vegetated road medians along Broadway. Not surprisingly, the medians harbored the fewest ant species, while the forests had the most. But contrary to expectations, the ants’ tiny size did not limit their ability to get around town. Instead of colonizing places that were nearby, the same types of species tended to pop up in the same types of habitats, regardless of the distance between them. For example, even though the urban Morningside Park is relatively close to Central Park’s forests, the ants living in Central Park were more similar to those living many blocks north, in the forests of Inwood Hill Park. Maybe we have ants on the brain since our visit with entomologist and big thinker E.O. Wilson — but it’s a reminder of the way some kinds of wildlife have so thoroughly colonized our cities. And it’s no wonder ants — one of only a handful of other animals ever to organize themselves in complicated social structures — would taAll Related
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 14:14:30 +0000