joe.. do some research on ants..and if the ants did eat their dead... so what.?.. maybe we need to take a leaf out of their book...our graveyards are absurd... our funeral rites are plain silly give me a Tibetan funeral any day of the week why waste all that good quality protein? merle Edgar,
That's interesting. I see that it may take as much (long) as three days for the distasteful Oleic acid to form after an ant's death. The ant bodies I saw being carried back to the anthills were bodies of ants recently killed in battles with ants of other colonies. The battles and their casualties are what made a high flux of bodies being carried back even at all noticeable to me, in my observations of this going-on. I've seen this behavior in colonies in NJ, and in AZ, in both large red and black and colonies, and in colonies of the small brown ants. Maybe an ant body just a short time after killing is indeed palatable food; otherwise, I don't know why ants would bring them to the anthill and down inside, as they visibly do. --Joe > Edgar Owen <edgarowen@...> wrote: > > Most ant species, particularly the ones we are most exposed to, do not > practice cannibalism -
