Sending out feelers for food, friendship, mates
Hi, hi, hi, mate. What’s up?” one tiny marching ant seems to be asking the other as they meet on my table.
My magnifying glass transforms the tiny ants into colossal, alien-looking creatures and, close up, you can see that their interactions are so different from our impersonal social media pings. They are always busy, ants, but they always make time to greet one another with a twitch of their fidgety antennae as they go about their chores.
Watch them go about their business and you realise just how big a role these appendages play in their day. And it’s not just ants. Spiders and crustaceans have these twitchy feelers too, and there too they seem to have a role to pay in every major activ tifying foes or greeting friends.
They’re weird fellas, insects. They sleep with their eyes open, wear their skeletons on the outside, have super-sharp vision but can see only for a foot or two at a time; and other than a few vibrations, they inhabit a mostly silent world.
Their love lives are even more bizarre — what with all that fuss about the queen, limited numbers of males and no other fer about how they reproduce, the more you wonder that their species survive at all.
But back to the antennae, these key olfactory organs are remarkably sensitive to chemicals and environmental conditions. Flashing and twisting, they have for millions of years interpreted and relayed data on everything from taste and smell to sound, temperature and humidity, even aiding in flight stabilisation in
In essence, they’re a multi-tasking many-gadgets-rolled-in-one.
In the long-distance-migrant Monarch butterfly, the antennae also act as solar compasses. In various species, they help with swimming, mating, brooding, and even in anchoring a creature.
When ants, bees and butterflies reach a moist spot, the antennae tell them if it is plain water or a wholesome mineralrich solution When a mosquito it is the feelers that say, ‘Aha, yehi hai right choice’, based on slight temperature differences from the surrounding air.
Those of honey bees are especially complex, containing thousands of minute odour receptors. None of these insects would survive without these appendages.
In certain male moths, antennae are particularly large, flashy and furry, evolved to locate females by smell even over con by the scent of their pheromones.
Since antennae come in a variety of forms, shapes and sizes, it is they that help divide the legions of grasshopper clans into the short-horned (includes the dreaded locust, amongst others) and the long-horned (many crickets, katydids etc).
The structure of their antennae is one of the distinguishing characteristics between butterflies and moths too. From barely a millimetre in length, some feelers can be as long as 6 inches in certain crickets — several times their body length.
Sadly, our city has no such sensitive feelers. If it did, perhaps we too would have more orderly, well-administered lives and settlements. Perhaps then we could even dream of truly smart cities.
Sometimes I wish that, instead of the greatest brain in all of evolutionary history, we had evolved keener antennae to tell us right from not.
(Sunjoy Monga is a naturalist, photographer, and
the author of over a dozen