Can Ants Survive High Temperatures?
WouterAlmost every aspect of ant biology is affected by temperature. Temperatures affect the body’s ability to maintain coordination, its ability to offload heat, its foraging ability, and its survival. A large temperature increase can tip populations into a negative thermal performance curve, which means they can no longer maintain normal functioning. In response to these changes, ants seek out warmer locations.
Ants’ bodies can be cooled through enhanced radiative efficiency. This is facilitated by the ant’s triangular cross-section hairs, which are highly reflective in visible light and emissive in the mid-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. These hairs also increase ant’s ability to offload excess heat.
Ants’ heat tolerances are dependent on the size and species of ant colony. Urban and rural colonies showed similar but not related heat tolerances to body mass. However, the difference in dehydration rates was not important.
Urban and rural ants had similar mean times to recover from chill coma. Moreover, ants from a colony in Sao Paulo survived 20% longer than ants in a colony in a nearby city. However, ants from rural colonies survived only 179+-4.2 minutes.
The study’s results suggest that urban ants can survive a temperature increase, but do not alter the wider population dynamics of their species. Consequently, findings from this study should be interpreted with caution.
Climate change may affect ant diversity in ways that are not easily predicted, and may not be uniform across the globe. This has led to researchers testing whether ants can survive high temperatures in cities.
