How ants took over the world
Ants took over the world by following flowering plants out of prehistoric forests.
Ants are pretty much everywhere. There are more than 14,000 different species, spread over every continent except Antarctica, and researchers have estimated that there are more than four quadrillion individual ants on Earth – that is 4,000,000,000,000,000, SciTech Daily reported.
But how ants evolved to take over the world is still a mystery. In a new study in the journal Evolution Letters, scientists used a combination of fossils, DNA, and data on the habitat preferences of modern species to piece together how ants and plants have been evolving together over the past 60 million years.
They found that when flowering plants spread out from forests, the ants followed, kicking off the evolution of the thousands of ant species alive today.
“When you look around the world today, you can see ants on nearly every continent occupying all these different habitats, and even different dimensions of those habitats – some ants live underground, some live in the canopies of trees,” says Matthew Nelsen, a research scientist at the Field Museum in Chicago and lead author of the paper.
“We’re trying to understand how they were able to diversify from a single common ancestor to occupy all these different spaces.”
Scientists already knew that ants and flowering plants, or angiosperms, both originated around 140 million years ago and subsequently became more prevalent and spread to new habitats.