Ants Build Tiny Toilets

Tiny Toilets in Ant Colonies

A group of biologists have discovered that some ants set aside areas for toilets within their colony.

The researchers at Universität Regensburg in Bavaria studied Lasius niger ants, the common black garden ant found across Europe and parts of the Americas and Asia. They form colonies typically containing 4,000 to 7,000 workers.

Disease is a significant challenge for social animals with large colonies in confined spaces, as they are especially vulnerable to contagion. Refuse and fecal matter can be threats. Many social insects have evolved elaborate procedures for handling feces and other waste.

Some ants deposit waste material and feces in a special chamber or in a pile outside the nest. Scientists call such a pile a "kitchen midden" by analogy with waste piles in human settlements. Among the leaf-cutting ants, only the specialized refuse worker ants enter the refuse chamber.

Yellow Rain: Honeybee Feces or Chemical Weaponry?

Some spider mites that live in social colonies create a fecal pile just outside the entrance to their silk shelter.

Honey bees go on "defecation flights" to void their feces outside the hive. Even very young bees which do not otherwise leave the nest do so for defecation flights.

Nest Etiquette — Where Ants Go When Nature Calls

However, this study uncovered a previously undescribed ant behavior. Unlike other "kitchen midden" collection, these patches contained nothing but fecal material — no uneaten food or ant corpses. They truly were ant toilets.

Insect feces are not necessarily harmful, and may have a beneficial role. Beetle larvae use feces as a defensive shield. Leaf-cutting ants use their feces as fertilizer for the fungus they farm. Termites incorporate their feces as building and antimicrobial material.

How Did The Scientists Figure This Out?

The scientists established small colonies in plaster nests with multiple chambers divided into grids. They provided two sources of food, a colored sucrose solution and a differently colored protein source. Adult worker ants require little to no protein, and consuming protein or just amino acids can be lethal.

After a while, colored patches appeared within the nests. The patches were always the color of the sucrose solution. What they describe as a "dark, mud-like substance" appeared in the center of the more developed patches.

The fecal patches were mainly in the corners of the chambers. The ants formed these patches in the corners even when there were many unoccupied chambers in the nest. Meanwhile, "kitchen midden" type refuse was piled outside the nests. This included dead ants, debris, and pieces of the potentially lethal protein food.

However, Ant Feces Aren't Necessarily Dangerous

The scientists observed that the ants did not avoid the toilets. They thought that it might be significant that feces were collected in specific locations within the nest while dead nestmates are removed.

Maybe the ants use the collected feces as a source of salt or micronutrients. It's possible that nutrients not used by adult ants and therefore accumulating in the toilets would be beneficial to larvae. Maybe the toilets are used as fungal gardens and therefore a source of food.

Ants do things humans wouldn't do, like wash their young in harsh acid.

Formic acid, H-CO-OH

European alchemists and naturalists had noticed that ant hills emitted an acidic vapor at least as early as the 1400s. The English naturalist John Ray had the nutty idea of distilling a large number of ants in 1671.

He discovered HCOOH, a pungent colorless liquid. We now call it formic acid because formica is the Latin word for "ant". Ants secrete formic acid for both defensive and offensive purposes.

Continuing The Study

Black garden ants are a common choice for the casual ant farmer. Maybe you can observe ants building toilets in your very own ant farm!

As for the Bavarian entomologists, they're nowhere near done studying this:

Many further questions await investigation, however: are brood brought to, or kept from, the toilets? Do the toilets form via stygmergic mechanisms? Do the toilets have anti-microbial activities, or act as a source of dangerous pathogens? How widespread is this behaviour? Our description of these ant toilets is a first step in understanding these distinct nest structures. Their formation, characteristics, and role are now subjects ripe for study.

Next article:
You Can Flush But You Can't Hide

Geopolitical Bee Feces in Southeast Asia

In the early to mid 1980s, the United States accused the Soviet Union of conducting biochemical warfare in several Asian countries. Scientists found that the claimed biochemical weapons were actually bee droppings. The episode became a textbook case in how not to investigate and publicize suspected geopolitical misbehavior. The mysterious events had occurred since 1975, but in 1981 the U.S. made a public accusation of war crimes by the U.S.S.R. Alexander Haig, the U.S. Secretary of State, made a speech to the Berlin Press

The International Toilet Seat Trade

I somehow stumbled over the existence of a rather expensive book analyzing the international trade in wooden toilet seats. Really! The Icon Group International published a book titled "The 2007-2012 Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats in Greater China". Wow! And it's available for the low, low price of just US$ 495. Hmmm. That seems like a somewhat exorbitant price, especially when it's a forward-looking prediction for a time period that has already passed. But still, this is a narrowly-focused publication for specialists. The People's Republic

Don't Put The "P" In "Pool"!

Surveys say that one in five people admit to urinating in the swimming pool. That's how many admit to it, so imagine how many people really do! "It's harmless", they say, "there's chlorine in pool water." Yes, but that actually makes it worse. There is chlorine, but it's there to kill microorganisms. The danger is that it reacts with uric acid to create hazardous chemicals. A recent study by a chemical engineer at Purdue University along with three chemists from China Agricultural University reports

The Cultural History of Train Toilets

Or "Don't mind the filthy immigrants". In the 1880s, American trains featured Ladies' Lavatories, Gentlemens' Lavatories, and Immigrants' Lavatories. I learned this from Scientific American, which was a weekly publication in the late 1880s. 19th century volumes are available at archive.org. The content can seem odd by today's standards. There are announcements of patent filings, successful and not. Plus "how-to" advice for sometimes dangerous light industrial and chemical processes for the home enthusiast. Some of the articles demonstrate the Victorian era's obsession with protecting

The Earth Closet System

Did you ever look at a modern toilet and ask, "What if I built something similar to that, except using dirt instead of water?" Someone not only asked that, they built it! Ancient people had water-based flush toilets at least as early as 2600 BC. However, the technology was forgotten in Europe as the Roman Empire fell apart. The Dark Ages were a grim time. In England, flush toilets were only reinvented a little before 1600. Alexander Cummings (and not Thomas Crapper !) obtained

Airline Toilet Misadventures

Toilets on board airliners can fail or be abused in various ways. The waste tank fills, the water tank empties, or a deranged passenger smears his feces all over two lavatory compartments. And don't expect aircraft toilets to make sense. As the aircraft toilet page explains, there is no requirement for U.S. airliners to provide or clean on-board toilets. However, they are required to have ashtrays and slots to discard razor blades, even though smoking and razor blades are illegal on board. A strange