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'Pirate' ants discovered in Los Baños, Laguna


Arr, shiver me timbers! Pirates have been found living under a rock in the Philippines - pirate ants, that is.
 
These pirate ants got their names not because of their tendency to plunder, but because of the dark patches around their eyes, National Geographic reported.
 
“Due to the darkness of the rainforest and the translucent body parts of the tiny ants, they were nearly invisible,” said postdoctoral fellow and ant researcher Sabine Frohschammer of the University of Regensburg.
 
Frohschammer and fellow scientists discovered the ants, named Cardiocondyla pirata, near a stream while on a trip to the Philippines.
 
But Frohschammer sensed she found something special, as some females she gathered had unusual coloration around their eyes, like those of pirates in the movies.

"During a field study of ants in the Hortarium of the Los Baños University / Philippines, one of the authors collected two nest samples of a Cardiocondyla species that shows a pigmentation pattern unknown in any ant worldwide," the researchers said in their article on peer-reviewed open access journal, Zookeys.
 
"The new species belongs to a species group that is distributed from Thailand across the whole Indo-Malayan region and contains a minimum of six yet undescribed species," they also said.
 
The researchers added that the pirate ant  "is characterized by a strongly bilobate postpetiolar sternite, a thickset mesosoma with strongly convex dorsal profile and wingless, ergatoid males with sickle-shaped mandibles."
The pirate ants were discovered by chance while the researchers from Germany were walking near a stream in Los Baños, Laguna.

Eye patch
 
Citing her initial findings, Frohschammer said the ants appear to live their entire lives buried underground in almost complete darkness.
 
Bolstering this theory was that their eyes contain an abnormally small number of light receptors.
 
Frohschammer theorized that if these pirate ants live in the dark and cannot see very well, it is unlikely the eye patch is used as a signal during mating or to recognize their own.
 
Instead, she theorized the eye patch serves to confuse and distract predators, while the dark stripe seems to divide the ant’s tiny, translucent head in two.
 
Doing so could make predators think it may not be worth their effort.  — ELR, GMA News
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