Ants

I turned over a stone in my garden back in Istanbul, and here is what I saw. What are all these ants (Formica sp?) doing?

My sister, who had been observing them with me all along, suddenly screamed out that "The ants were making rice!" The "rice", of course, is the ants' multitudinous pupae and eggs. Notice how they come in different sizes. Is this because they were destined to hatch into different ant castes, or were the smaller ones simply younger? I was as clueless as my little sister about this question.

Usually, a single queen is responsible for all the egg-laying in the colony. The queens are really conspicuous creatures, usually several times larger than their workers. We found the queen of this hive secreted in a seemingly artificial "brooding chamber," alongside some of her most recently-laid eggs. We carefully replaced the stone that had been shielding the colony, and left the ants alone to make more "rice."

Ants are some of the most flabbergastingly diverse, weird and wonderful organisms on our planet, and with sites like AntWeb and Antbase around, you no longer have an excuse not to learn more about them.