Should I have called this post: “You won’t believe these animals that look like ants!”?
I won’t reiterate the many reasons why I love mimics, and why every evolutionary biologist (or even admirer of nature) should, too. Just go over to photographer/entomologist Alex Wild‘s lovely “ant mimic” page to see the diversity of taxa that have evolved to mimic pismires. Here are a few of the mimics; now guess the group to which the mimic belongs. Put your guess below. (No prize this time. .)
These are copyrighted and are reproduced with permission; please do not reproduce further without asking Alex here.
1.
2.
3.
4,
5.
6. Some of these are real ants; others are not. What are the non-ants?
Go see several others at Alex’s site. This is what we in the trade call “convergent evolution,” but of course the selective pressures to evolve resemblance to an ant can be very diverse.
No, this sort of post gets a title like this:
These pictures will make your head explode!!
Totes amazeballs. Aren’t they fabulous? Only if someone told me would I think these were not ants.
See Why These Pictures Are So Formicable!
Indeed.
And relatedly, in Swedish ants are myror, and the common name for formic acid myrsyra (ant acid).
+🐜
In an attempt to count legs to spot the spiders, it seems that photos 1 and 5 have four legs on one side and three on the other.
Can someone explain (or is it just that I can’t count)?
Arthropods can shed their legs. 1 and 5 are spiders; 2-4 are reduviids (true bugs); and 6 are beetles of some sort.
Is 3 a wasp then?
Look at the stylet (piercing, sucking mouthpart) folded up under its head; that’s one of the characteristics of a true bug. The rest of its morphology leads me to believe it’s a kissing bug (Family Reduviidae).
You say stylet, I thought it was usually called a rostrum?
Borror, Triplehorn, and Johnson says we’re both wrong, though not explicitly, calling it a beak. However, Torre-Bueno seems to suggest we’re both right but that you may be righter because it gives ‘beak’ as a synonym for ‘rostrum’. I’m going to use ‘beak’ from now on so there’s no question. Thanks!
A buddy of mine, an Entomology Professor, says he calls it a proboscis or beak. He said he doesn’t use either stylet or rostrum. But then he is Canadian.
That was what I figured too (though I didn’t get as far as reduviids, just true bugs).
Ah, I thought that the 1st one’s legs looked very spidery!
You can count! Turns out, both the spiders are missing a single leg. They can “drop” their legs if they are injured or being grabbed by a predator.
Yes you can count! Both spiders happen to have “dropped” (=autotomy) a single leg.
You could almost suppose these species may be predisposed to drop legs to add versimilitude
I thought arachnids for 1 and 5 too. I’m stumped on the others.
I’m constantly filled with wonder at the things that have evolved. I feel like if more people were exposed to this amazing stuff, they would realize they don’t need religion to fill any gaps in their experiences.
Me too.
I can still remember a science lesson from a field trip in the 3rd grade. My class went to a butterfly garden that was near our school. The woman leading our tour taught us about the viceroy and monarch butterflies and how the viceroy adapted to resemble the poisonous monarch. That moment was the very instant when I began to grasp the concept of evolution.
Cool story.
I plant swan plants outside my kitchen windows every year so I can watch the monarchs develop. We have very few different butterflies in NZ. Monarchs were introduced along with the English settlers when they brought their plants.
Apropos of the ant mimics, the Tuesday NY Times, Science Times, has a very interesting article regarding the Canadian tiger swallowtail caterpillar that mimics a snake to save it from predatory birds…
1 and 5 are spiders (eyes). 2 and 3 are immature hemiptera (wings, piercing mouthparts). #4 is not an ant (wrong kind of body part connections). No idea what #6 is, but, but process of eliimination, if some of them are ants, this might be the one.
If you go to Alex’s site and click on the picture, it will tell you what each mimic is.
Why would a spider want to imitate an ant? To blend in to catch them off their guard, maybe? Why not ants imitating spiders, or does this exist also?
I think to blend in for sneaking up on them. But also to be protected from other predators since ants taste bad.
5 was real obvious, 1 took a 2nd look because it looks much more like an ant than 5. The 7 legs on number 1 had me doubting my eyes, but its eyes were a give away.
I do not know what is going on in #6. But if you double click to enlarge, you can see that in the middle is a black and shiny object that does not have the same texture as the ants. That may be the miscre-ant. But I am not sure.
I think the ants look like they are farming it. So I suspect a true bug of some sort.
I’ve never seen spiders mimicking ants. Now that is cool!
Wonderful images, and most interesting subjects.
The spider ant mimics both attract and repulse me!
Wow!!
No 6 is too hard. I really tried; I looked for absence of antennae and number of legs, but it’s too chaotic. Fail.
1 and 5 are spiders. I sure hope Alex didn’t pull legs off the near sides of these guys for the photo shoot!
2, 3 and 4 are hemipterans (true bugs), family Reduviidae/assassin bugs.
But I simply can’t get #6 might also be hemipterans too, I’m thinking leafhoppers family-Membracoidea)?
Off to check Alex’s site to find out about that last one!