Paleontologists have observed trapped in a piece of Burmese amber a unique scene of a prehistoric ‘hell ant’ (subfamily Haidomyrmecinae) attacking a nymph of Caputoraptor elegans, an extinct cockroach relative. The historic come across presents some of the very first immediate evidence showing how the freshly-identified hell ant species, Ceratomyrmex ellenbergeri, and other hell ants when used their killer characteristics — snapping their strange, but deadly, scythe-like mandibles in a vertical movement to pin prey towards their horn-like appendages. The analyze was printed in the journal Present Biology.
A employee of the hell ant Ceratomyrmex ellenbergeri grasping a nymph of Caputoraptor elegans preserved in amber from Myanmar. Graphic credit score: New Jersey Institute of Technological innovation / Chinese Academy of Sciences / University of Rennes.
“Fossilized behavior is exceedingly scarce, predation specially so,” claimed lead author Dr. Phillip Barden, a researcher in the Section of Organic Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technological know-how and the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Normal History.
“As paleontologists, we speculate about the perform of ancient diversifications making use of readily available proof, but to see an extinct predator caught in the act of capturing its prey is priceless.”
“This fossilized predation confirms our hypothesis for how hell ant mouthparts labored. The only way for prey to be captured in this kind of an arrangement is for the ant mouthparts to go up and downward in a course not like that of all dwelling ants and practically all bugs.”
The hell ant lineage, together with their striking predatory traits, are suspected to have vanished along with numerous other early ant teams all through periods of ecological modify close to the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 65 million many years in the past.
“Since the very first hell ant was unearthed about a hundred decades ago, it is been a thriller as to why these extinct animals are so distinct from the ants we have right now,” Dr. Barden mentioned.
“This fossil reveals the mechanism guiding what we could phone an evolutionary experiment, and despite the fact that we see many this sort of experiments in the fossil report, we typically really don’t have a very clear image of the evolutionary pathway that led to them.”
Dr. Barden and colleagues suggest that variations for prey-seize probably describe the abundant range of mandibles and horns noticed in the 16 species of hell ants identified to date.
Some species with unarmed, elongate horns these types of as Ceratomyrmex ellenbergeri evidently grasped prey externally, though other hell ants these types of as the a short while ago-found Linguamyrmex vladi were considered to have employed a metal-reinforced horn on its head to impale prey — a trait likely utilised to feed on the internal liquid (hemolymph) of insects.
“The earliest hell ant ancestors would have to start with acquired the skill to shift their mouthparts vertically,” Dr. Barden explained.
“This, in switch, would functionally integrate the mouthparts and head in a way that was exclusive to this extinct lineage.”
“Integration is a impressive shaping pressure in evolutionary biology — when anatomical components purpose jointly for the first time, this opens up new evolutionary trajectories as the two features evolve in live performance,” he mentioned.
“The effects of this innovation in mouthpart motion with the hell ants are amazing. Though no contemporary ants have horns of any sort, some species of hell ant have horns coated with serrated tooth, and some others like Linguamyrmex vladi are suspected to have strengthened its horn with metal to protect against its have chunk from impaling by itself.”
To check out additional, the scientists in comparison the head and mouthpart morphology of Ceratomyrmex ellenbergeri and quite a few other hell ant species (these as head, horn and mandible size) with equivalent datasets of living and fossil ant species.
They also carried out a phylogenetic evaluation to reconstruct evolutionary interactions among both Cretaceous and contemporary ants.
Their analyses confirmed that hell ants belong to 1 of the earliest branches of the ant evolutionary tree and are each individual other’s closest kinfolk.
Moreover, the marriage concerning mandible and head morphology is special in hell ants as opposed to living lineages as a final result of their specialised prey-capture conduct.
The analyses also demonstrated that elongated horns evolved two times in hell ants.
When the fossil has last but not least furnished the researchers with firmer solutions as to how this long-misplaced class of ant predators functioned and located achievement for practically 20 million many years, issues persist such as what led these and other lineages to go extinct though present day ants flourished into the ubiquitous insects we know right now.
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Phillip Barden et al. Specialized Predation Drives Aberrant Morphological Integration and Variety in the Earliest Ants. Recent Biology, released on-line August 6, 2020 doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.06.106
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