Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Animal Planet Doccumentry about Ants


Documentary about Ants:
Yesterday I was watching Animal planet as usual and threre was a documentary going on about ants.What they were showing was awesome.The film was featured on life of ants near Amazon river.It contained everything from how the day for the Ants start and what do the ants do in there day to day life and how the process changes according to seasons.
But what I liked most was te last part of the documentary which contained what do the ants do when their nest is drowned in the Amazon floods. What they do in such case is really amazing.The worker ants make a live raft by holding each others' legs together.It becomes a huge raft really.

Then the warrior or guard ants carry their queen on that raft.The queen really needs protection as if there is queen, there can be mre and more ants and the system will continue but without queen the ants will die soon as they won't have further population to run the system.So coming back to the topic, the ants take care of queen and protect her from all sides on the raft and then the raft flows.In this process many of the ant die in the water but they don't care about themselves and perform this act.The raft is driven by river current.One more thing I would like to tell here is this liveraft don't have any tool giving direction so they are really depending on the river current for direction nd flow.
Meanwhile the raft faces many dangers from creatures living in the surroundings of the river.Many fishes like eating these ants and they strightway attack this raft of ants as its the most easy pray for them.They virtually bite this live raft and the size of the raft gets reduced with every such bite.But still these ants don't bother and remain connected to eachother clinging their legs firmly.There are few birds who live on the trees besides the river bank who love to eat ants.So these birds also cause reducing the raft size.But still the voyage continues.
And if the ants are lucky, they atlst get very close to the river bank .At this point the ants remain calm and patient they do next process step by step.First of all they carry queen ant to the bank in dry area.Then turn by turn the raft gets dismentaled and the ants are ready to build a new coloney.
The sacrifice they do for their coloney is really amazing.I really salute ants for this descipline and dedication.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I saw that documentary, and was amazed about how they got from one side of the river to the other also (although the visual gave me the "heebie-jeebies"