To ease on in to the weekend, let’s celebrate by watching some short films on a topic that I mentioned earlier this week in my planthopper post: plant bug poo, aka honeydew. It’s not as gross as you might think. Plant bugs feed on plant sap, which is seriously low in protein. In order to [...]

Thrifty Thursdays feature photographs movies taken with equipment costing less than $500. [Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3 - $241; Glidetrack shooter - $276] I often fill the Thrifty Thursday slot with still photographs from my trusty Panasonic digicam. As much as I like the camera for snapshots, though, I actually bought it for video. This clip was [...]

When Catherine Chalmers headed to Costa Rica for the third time this past January, she had a script in mind that told a very specific story: the stripping of nature. With a cast of hundreds, if not thousands, she would film a leafy branch being reduced to wood to represent the larger picture of clear-cutting [...]

Want to know how ants think? Look to the robots. A study published in PLOS Computational Biology explains how researchers used tiny robots to investigate ant behavior. The researchers wanted to know if real ants use geometry to navigate their environment. They sent the robots through mazes where all paths diverged at the same angle, [...]

An ant colony, made up of many thousands of individuals, actually functions more like one giant organism. Ants use their unified strength to build bridges, raft across rivers and even wage war on neighboring colonies (as scientist Mark Moffett explains in a recent Scientific American feature). But what if you want to study the behavior [...]

Tens of millions of years before humanity sowed its first crops, a somewhat humbler organism was starting up its own large-scale agricultural operations. Leaf-cutter ant species depend on actively managed fungus farming to feed their teaming colonies. The ant’s newly sequenced genome, based on three male Atta cephalotes ants collected in Gamboa, Panama, and described [...]

The Giant Anteater, Myrmecophaga tridactyla, only eats ants and termites, as its name suggests. Since the giant anteater and its evolutionary ancestors have been feasting on ants and termites for nearly 60 million years, a researcher named Kent Redford hypothesized that, over time, ants and termites may have evolved various defenses to avoid predation. In [...]

The more scientists discover about desert ants, the more impressive they seem. Decades of research have established that ants use path integration – an innate form of mental trigonometry – in order to navigate the visually featureless environments that are the salt pans of Tunisia. They do this by calibrating a mental clock based on [...]

This marks the 500th post in the history of The Thoughtful Animal! To mark the occasion, I thought I’d revise and repost the post that started it all. This wasn’t the first post I ever wrote, but it was the first post I wrote (back when I was blogging at WordPress) that got any sort [...]