To the naked eye, ants deal with their dead much like humans. When a member of the colony dies, the carcass will lie where it fell for a period of roughly two days. In the fashion of a wake, this time period presumably gives the other ants time to pay their respects to their fallen comrade. Or, they are taken to another area within the nest that is dedicated as a tomb. Ants sometimes actually bury their dead. Oleic is a chemical that is released two days following the death of an ant.
When other ants smell it they know that there are dead ants nearby. Once this scent reaches the other members of the ant colony they immediately answer by searching out the dying ant.
Workers designated as undertakers will carry the corpse back to the area known as a midden. Ants simply are reacting to the smell of pheromones and other chemicals.
These tiny insects are just doing their job as they clean it all away whenever they smell oleic acid. Ants are social insects and it is a matter of life and death for them to maintain good housekeeping. Insects remove the deceased bodies within their colony out of habit. They do this for the health of the rest of the colony.
Science has proven it is imperative for ants to remove the corpses of dead ants from the nest timely. If this is not done, the rest of the colony may not survive. It could be an indication there is an ant infestation close by. Or the site where you see a pile of dead ants may actually be termites.
Ants will collect the deceased species and place them in a type of garbage dump away from the nest. The dead ants you find in your home may be victims of larger insects. As well as being a kind of dumpster, the midden also functions as a cemetery.
Ants transport their dead there in order to protect themselves and their queen from contamination. This behavior has to do with the way ants communicate with each other via chemicals.
When an ant dies, its body releases a chemical called oleic acid. Ants, bees, and termites all tend to their dead, either by removing them from the colony or burying them.
Since these social insects form densely crowded societies that face many pathogens, disposing of the dead is as a form of preventive medicine. Removing risky items that could infect them, like corpses, helps ensure their health. Workers serve as undertakers in mature ant colonies, removing dead individuals and carrying them to a trash pile either far away or in a specialized chamber of the nest.
In certain species, they will bury the corpse instead. The surviving queen will bite the corpse into chunks and then bury those pieces, says study author and evolutionary biologist Chris Pull of Royal Holloway, University of London. Watch ants carry their wounded off the battlefield in findings from a separate study.
In disposing of the dead, the surviving queen reduces the chance of her own death sevenfold, Pull and his coauthor found, thus improving the likelihood that her newly formed colony will survive. In honeybee colonies, dead or diseased individuals are quickly disposed of. After first briefly bringing their antennae into contact with the deceased, an undertaker bee then grabs its appendages in its jaw and drops it outside.
Not only does the species remove the dead from a colony faster than other debris, but a study in the journal Animal Behavior found that honeybees removed one-hour-old corpses more quickly than freshly killed individuals. This small group of specialized workers are mostly middle-aged workers and represent a small subset of the colony—just 1 to 2 percent of the population.
While most social insects remove their dead from the nest, termite corpses are buried into the nest. As with other social insects, postmortem changes in chemical signatures allow termites to quickly identify that a fellow colony member has died.
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