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Ants can smell life and death
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When an ant dies, its fellows quickly carry it away from the colony, a process known as necrophoresis. Until now scientists had been unsure how ants were able to differentiate living ants from dead ones. As it turns out, dead ants literally carry a stench of death.
Actually, all ants carry the death stench. However, living ants also exude an odorous chemical that signal the fact they are still alive. Once an ant dies and the “live” chemical degrades, the unmasked “dead” chemical tells the worker ants to carry the body away, protecting the colony from disease that accompanies corpses.
The death signal always being present made for a unique problem for scientists. “We generally admit a signal as being something which is newly emerged, like turning on a light bulb,” said Dong-Hwan Choe, entomologist of University of California, Riverside. “However, if we have a light bulb which has been left turned on continuously, turning it off can be a good signal, too.” [NY Times]
Scientists have been relatively certain for some time that ants use their sense of smell to distinguish dead companions. However, the standing theory was “that ants were responding to fatty acids and other chemical cues from the decomposing corpse. But the researchers noticed that ants would haul a corpse away within an hour after death — before much decomposition began.” [NY Times]
Therefore, the entomologists hunted for a different theory to explain the ants’ efficient use of necrophoresis. They found the ants produce two compounds that effectively mask the ever-present death signal. However, those compounds break down within an hour of death.
Precisely which chemicals serve as the catalyst for necrophoresis weren’t identified, but the researchers did find that certain fats must contain the same compounds. When the fats were extracted “from live ants and painted them onto pupae (which don’t produce the life and death chemicals), worker ants promptly hauled the pupae to the rubbish pile to join the colony’s dead.” [Discover]
The ants studied were the vicious Argentine ant. Whether all ants signal death in the same manner as well as if all ants use the same chemicals to do the signaling has yet to be determined. The study was published in the current issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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