If you hate ants, I hope you never meet the one that looks like Lord Voldemort
A team of scientists discovered a species of ant, which is almost undetectable and scary because it is a predator. It moves very well in the dark and has a poison that immobilises.
There are more than 10,000 species of ants on the planet, however researchers from the University of Western Australia (UWA) discovered one of the most dangerous. This is the species “leptanilla Voldemort”, found after excavations in the arid Pilbara region in the north of Western Australia.
These insects are present throughout the world, except for the Arctic and Antarctic. They are especially common in tropical forests, they are endowed with some truly exceptional qualities and although they rarely exceed two centimetres in length, they are the strongest in the world, being able to lift almost three times their body weight.
The new species has some characteristics that make it even more special: it is underground, pale, with a slender build, thin legs and long, sharp jaws. Precisely because of these characteristics, he seems to have some kind of relationship with Lord Voldemort, the well-known Harry Potter villain.
The main researcher, Dr. Mark Wong, from the UWA Faculty of Biological Sciences, was the one who named them this way (L. Voldemort for short), in homage to “The Dark Lord” since these ants are ghostly and live in the shadows.
What you didn't know about ants
Ants are very common insects, however they are endowed with some truly exceptional and unique qualities, for example they are very small but have a lot of strength. They also share very similar traits with wasps and bees, since they evolved from a common ancestor.
One of his best-known traits is his hypersociality. They are organised in communities located underground whose axis of power is the queen ant and the rest of the groups are assigned a specific function within the colony that pursues a common objective: protecting the life of the queen's daughters so that the species continues to survive.
Ants communicate and cooperate using chemicals that can alert others to danger or lead them to a promising food source. They typically eat nectar, seeds, fungi, or insects. However, some species have diets that are more unusual. Some species are scavengers and others herbivores, and there is a known case of a species in the Amazon in which its members cooperate to create traps and thus manage to hunt some prey.
The discovered ant has something that makes it unique
Among the thousands of ant species, only about 60 belong to the genus Leptanilla. As we mentioned, community life is one of the great virtues of these insects, however this variant is very different even in social behaviour since they live in small colonies, generally composed of a queen and only a hundred workers that They nest and feed exclusively underground.
L. Voldemort is the second species of Leptanilla discovered on the continent, so this finding gains special attention. To describe it, nothing better than mentioning some characteristics of this fearsome ant:
- It is adapted to life in the dark.
- She is blind.
- Very small in size (between 1 and 2 mm).
- It has sharp jaws.
- It can bite and immobilise other larger animals.
- It feeds on decomposing corpses.
- They lack pigmentation.
- They feed on small arthropods, such as centipedes.
The two specimens that were discovered will continue to be analysed, since the qualities of these insects continue to surprise scientists. The evolution of these insects takes millions of years.
One of the aspects that most caught the attention of researchers is that these ants "play dead" to survive, they have a powerful venom and feed on hemolymph, a circulatory fluid (like our blood) from the larvae of the captured specimen. That is why they are convinced that there is still much to discover about this new species, found in one of the most diverse countries on the planet.