Syzdekistan

From the “I had no idea” department. Tree living ants in the Amazon rainforest have recently been observed to glide back to the tree truck if dislodged from the the canopy. A straight fall to the forest floor would be deadly because the forest is often flooded and there are dangerous ant predators in the leaf litter. For the story of how this was discovered and videos, read this FAQ.

The first observation of gliding in ants occurred when I was climbing trees on Barro Colorado Island in Panama in 1998. I accidentally put my hand down on a Cephalotes atratus worker causing its thoracic spines to become lodged in my skin. When I brushed the ant away, I watched its path through the air and noticed that it appeared to glide back to the tree trunk. I dropped a few more ants and saw that the behavior was consistent. Unfortunately, I was at the end of my field season and did not have time to follow up these observations with experiments, but I discussed it briefly with my colleague, Dr. Mike Kaspari, and wrote a quick summary of the observation for future reference. Five years later I was confronted by hundreds of C. atratus workers while climbing a tree in Peru to collect mosquitoes…. I brushed the ants off of the branch and watched in amazement as they glided back to the trunk in a J-shaped cascade. Since then, understanding gliding behavior in ants has occupied most of my free time.