{"id":21,"date":"2014-05-10T19:31:16","date_gmt":"2014-05-10T17:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/?p=21"},"modified":"2014-07-07T22:50:42","modified_gmt":"2014-07-07T20:50:42","slug":"giant-ant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/giant-ant\/","title":{"rendered":"Giant Abandoned Ant Colony"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"padding-bottom:15px; padding-top:2px;\" class=\"hupso-share-buttons\"><!-- Hupso Share Buttons - https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/ --><a class=\"hupso_toolbar\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/\"><img src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/dot.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\"\/><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var hupso_services_t=new Array(\"Twitter\",\"Facebook\",\"Linkedin\");var hupso_background_t=\"#84FF5E\";var hupso_border_t=\"#FFE959\";var hupso_toolbar_size_t=\"medium\";var hupso_image_folder_url = \"\";var hupso_twitter_via=\"SwarmStrength\";var hupso_url_t=\"\";var hupso_title_t=\"Giant%20Abandoned%20Ant%20Colony\";<\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/js\/share_toolbar.js\"><\/script><!-- Hupso Share Buttons --><\/div><p lang=\"en-US\">Dr. Luiz Carlos Forti, \u00a0professor at <a title=\"UNESP\" href=\"http:\/\/www.fca.unesp.br\/#!\/international\/eng\/home\/\" target=\"_blank\">UNESP<\/a> (S\u00e0o Paulo State University, <span style=\"color: #000000;\">Brazil<\/span>), leads the\u00a0excavation of a huge\u00a0subterranean megalopolis built by Leafcutter ants that spanned an area of more than 538 square feet and delved 26 feet into the earth.<\/p>\n<p lang=\"en-US\"><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><iframe src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/lFg21x2sj-M\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p lang=\"en-US\"><span class=\"bodyContent\" style=\"color: #000000;\">Leafcutter ants live primarily in the tropical and semi-tropical rainforests of South and Central America.They play a key role for the ecosystem, both in the aeration of the soil and in the redistribution of nutrients in the forests they inhabit. (The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct, \u00a0by\u00a0<a title=\"Bert H\u00f6lldobler\" href=\"http:\/\/it.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bert_H%C3%B6lldobler\" target=\"_blank\"><span class=\"vcard\" style=\"color: #666666;\">Bert H\u00f6lldobler<\/span><\/a><span class=\"vcard\" style=\"color: #666666;\">,<a title=\"Edward Osborne Wilson\" href=\"http:\/\/it.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Edward_Osborne_Wilson\" target=\"_blank\">\u00a0Edward O. Wilson<\/a>,\u00a0<em>Harvard University<\/em><\/span>).<\/span><\/p>\n<p lang=\"en-US\"><span style=\"color: #252525;\">Leafcutter ants &#8220;cut and process fresh vegetation (leaves, flowers, and grasses) to serve as the nutritional substrate for their fungal cultivars&#8221;.<\/span><\/p>\n<p lang=\"en-US\"><span style=\"color: #252525;\">We can consider the\u00a0leafcutter ants as one\u00a0of the largest and most complex animal societies on Earth after\u00a0humans. In a few years, the central mound of their underground nests can grow to more than 30\u00a0m (98\u00a0ft) across, with smaller, radiating mounds extending out to a radius of 80\u00a0m (260\u00a0ft), taking up 30 to 600\u00a0m<\/span><sup style=\"color: #252525;\">2<\/sup><span style=\"color: #252525;\">\u00a0(320 to 6,460\u00a0sq\u00a0ft) and containing eight million individuals<\/span><\/p>\n<p lang=\"en-US\">Following very simple rules ants can <span style=\"color: #000000;\">achieve incredible results<\/span>\u00a0through primitive interactions among the individuals in the colony. Despite\u00a0there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave and these interactions could be primitive, taken together they result in efficient solutions to difficult problems.<\/p>\n<p lang=\"en-US\">These castles of clay, relative to the individual termites that helped build them, are air-conditioned structures immensely larger and more sophisticated than the vast majority of human buildings.<\/p>\n<div style=\"padding-bottom:15px; padding-top:2px;\" class=\"hupso-share-buttons\"><!-- Hupso Share Buttons - https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/ --><a class=\"hupso_toolbar\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/\"><img src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/dot.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\"\/><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var hupso_services_t=new Array(\"Twitter\",\"Facebook\",\"Linkedin\");var hupso_background_t=\"#84FF5E\";var hupso_border_t=\"#FFE959\";var hupso_toolbar_size_t=\"medium\";var hupso_image_folder_url = \"\";var hupso_twitter_via=\"SwarmStrength\";var hupso_url_t=\"\";var hupso_title_t=\"Giant%20Abandoned%20Ant%20Colony\";<\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/js\/share_toolbar.js\"><\/script><!-- Hupso Share Buttons --><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dr. Luiz Carlos Forti, \u00a0professor at UNESP (S\u00e0o Paulo State University, Brazil), leads the\u00a0excavation of a huge\u00a0subterranean megalopolis built by Leafcutter ants that spanned an area of more than 538 square feet and delved 26 feet into the earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[46],"tags":[30,21,22,19,13,20,7,31,32,18],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":376,"href":"https:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions\/376"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swarm-intelligence.it\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}