One of my favorite shows as a kid was MacGyver, I mean, with nothing more than a dab of toothpaste and a slice of aluminum foil Richard Dean Anderson managed to shift the trade winds and realign the planets into their proper orbits. And of course, who could forget his arch-nemesis Murdoc!
Anyways, I'm not sure if you guys remember Episode 6 of the first season (Trumbo's World), but it was one of my most memorable episodes: the Army Ant one. You see a mass of what look like hot tamales scurrying across the jungle floor devouring every animal (anything really) in their path. As a boy, such a creature consumed much of my non-sleeping, non-recess, non-cartoon day. I would spend hours reading up on what a thorax and abdomen did and imagined what it would be like to have an exoskeleton impervious to bullets (I said imagined).
And then one day I grew up and left the creepy-crawling Ant Kingdom behind. It appears however, that someone picked up my preliminary Nobel-prize class research and has further continued the study of these unfurry, unmeaty and unsavory insects.
Apparently, these fearsome six-legged scavengers have not evolved at all in the past 100 million years – that date varies slightly with my finding pegged at approximately 97.369 million years (hehe, could you imagine a 10-year old kid using some sort of radioactive-decay instrument to carbon date a footprint left behind by one of those insects?).
Sean Brady, a Cornell postdoctoral researcher in entomology "studied the DNA of 30 army ant species and 20 possible ancestors within the army ant community, divided between the New World species in Ecitoninae and the Old World groups Aenictinae and Dorylinae. He specifically sought information from four different genes to uncover clues to their relationships."
And what he discovered was nothing short of a shocking Jerry Springer episode: they were all related. Or as he said, "If they share those mutations, we can infer they evolved from the same source.”
So the next time you’re deep in the Amazonian rainforest, sipping a java and catching some rays and you notice a mile long brigade of hot tamales marching through the jungle, you’ll know that the smug grin plastered on their face today, is the same one they had when Chupacabras, Yeti’s and Homo promiscuous walked the earth.
Posted by Tim at May 13, 2003 12:19 AM | TrackBackMy husband said these are here at our home in Arizona and I still am sceptical but he said he see's one every night in out bathtub. I am a little concerned about it and know nothing about these ants but it is amazing the information on them. Donna
Posted by: Donna at July 6, 2004 07:58 AM