USF Professor discovers fire ants play dead to survive
Fire ants create territories, care for their young and even fight to the death to defend their homes. But USF professor Deby Cassill and her Experimental Design in Biology class at the St. Petersburg campus have discovered another interesting quality: Fire ants can also play dead.
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Cassill and the class have posited two explanations as to why the ants fake their deaths. One was to ensure the survival of valuable younger workers to tend to the queen and increase the colony’s size. Another was that newly hatched ants, more apt to injuries in battles because of their soft external skeletons, are less aggressive.
Cassill, a biologist specializing in evolutionary biology and the evolution of social behavior, said ants and human beings are similar in more ways than one.
“Ants are one of the few social species that are anatomically very different from humans but a lot of their social behavior parallels human behaviors,” Cassill said. “So what I bring to the research on social behavior is kind of a psychological point of view. I’m interested in what the individual does and how they interact with others.”
