Ants once crawled on the bark of trees, but they didn’t know that a drip of resin could decide their fate for nearly 100 million years.
When tree resin slides down the trunk, it doesn’t look much different. It’s thick and sticky and traps anything that gets too close. When that resin hardens into amber, it can capture small moments from a world long gone.
A snapshot of life on Earth
In some cases, a piece of amber may contain one or more unlucky insects. Scientists instead found smaller groups, such as ants next to ticks, spiders next to wasps, or several species frozen together in the same golden resin droplet.
The big question is simple. Were these creatures actually interacting, or were they simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?
The Spanish team set out to find an answer. They focused on six rare pieces of amber in which multiple species are preserved together, a phenomenon called “syninclusion.”
This study was led by Dr. Jose de la Fuente. Hunting and Wildlife Research Institute In Spain.
“Inclusions in amber represent possible interactions between the different organisms that shape the environment,” Dr. de la Fuente explained.
“The identification and morphological characterization of fossil ants, including other insects in amber, provides a snapshot of life on Earth millions of years ago.”
Amber sample with ancient ants in it
Ants may be small, but they punch above their weight in the ecosystem. They move soil, sow seeds, hunt pests, and cultivate fungi. they form a huge colony within a complex social system.
Understanding the early history of ants helps scientists understand how modern ecosystems formed.
The earliest ants appeared in the Late Cretaceous. dinosaur I was still walking around. These early forms, known as stem ants, left no modern descendants.
All living ants evolved from a group later known as clown ants. There were also hell ants, descendants of stem ants, with strange characteristics not seen in modern ants.
The six amber samples contained both trunk and crown ants in addition to hem ants. The four works date back approximately 99 million years. Cretaceous period period.
One of these dates from the Eocene period, approximately 56 million to 34 million years ago. The other came during the Oligocene epoch, about 34 to 23 million years ago.
The researchers used powerful microscopes to identify each species captured and measure the distances between them. It turns out that these distances are important.
Ants and ticks: a close relationship?
In three of the six ambers, the ants appeared to be very close to the mites. In case 1, a crested ants were preserved along with a wasp and two mites. The ticks were very close to the ants, so they may have been traveling on them.
In case 4, stem ants and mites were found approximately 4 millimeters apart. Case 5 had three different types of ants in the vicinity of a tick and several termites, as well as poorly preserved mosquitoes and winged insects.
Distance is important here. The smaller the gap, the more likely it is to reflect an actual interaction before the resin captures the gap.
“The closest ant co-inclusions likely reflect behaviors and interactions between these organisms,” Dr. de la Fuente said. “The ant-mite interaction proposed in case 4 could reflect two possible scenarios.”
“Firstly, there is a symbiotic and special temporal relationship in which the tick attaches to the ant and disperses free-riding to new habitats.Secondly, Parasitic When the mite feeds on the ant host during transport. ”
Today’s mites often mount insects, including ants. Some people simply use them for transportation. This is an action called foreshy. Others feed on their hosts. Amber suggests these relationships may date back nearly 100 million years.
Spiders, wasps, and possible coincidences
Not all close combinations tell a clear story. In case 6, researchers found a stem ant next to what they thought was a parasitic wasp. It looked like the ants were eating something. It was placed on top of another insect contaminant, which may have been a worm or larva.
However, there was no clear indication that they were interacting. The researchers suspect that the particular groupings were due to chance rather than fixed behavior during the course of the action.
Case 2 included stem ants and spiders. Case 3 contained hell ants, snails, millipedes, and several insects that could not be clearly identified.
Now, some spiders imitate ants to avoid predators or sneak up on prey. The spider in case 6 was a type of spider that can mimic ants. If it was closer to the real thing, it might have been an advantage in life. Whether that happened here remains unclear.
That uncertainty is part of the story. Amber holds position, but not always intention.
Read the behavior of stones
Amber with ants in it is rare. Works containing multiple species are even rarer. Scientists must be careful not to overinterpret what they see. two insect It does not automatically mean that they are interacting in the same resin flow.
Still, patterns are important. When ants and mites repeatedly appear in close proximity, it suggests something more than coincidence.
“Future studies will need to use advanced imaging techniques to improve the analysis of interactions between different organisms in fossil amber inclusions,” said Dr. de la Fuente. “Nonetheless, these results provide evidence of the insect’s behavioral and ecological habits.”
New tools such as micro-CT scans may be helpful. These scans reveal small structures inside the fossil, including attachment organs that the tick may have used to cling to its host. This level of detail could strengthen the case for ancient hitchhiking or parasitism.
For now, these six amber shards provide a small but powerful clue. They show that even in the time of the dinosaurs, ants were already part of a complex network of predators, parasites, and partners.
The distance between two small celestial bodies of just a few millimeters can open a window into a world nearly 100 million years old.
The entire study was published in the journal Frontiers of ecology and evolution.
Image credit: Dr. Jose de la Fuente
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