Why can ants predict that it will rain the next day

Ants choose to move on cloudy days or at night, mainly to prevent the possible damage to ant eggs caused by sun exposure. Because people don't pay attention to the actions of ants at night, they can often see the activities of ants on cloudy days, so they associate ant activities with rain.

It can be said that ants can accurately feel that it is going to rain by instinct, and even can accurately feel the rainfall. After all, it is not a comfortable thing for those raindrops to hit you. If ants can't return to their nests in time before the rainstorm, they may be washed away by the sudden rainstorm, so they can't go home or even die. Although the life of an ant is nothing to human eyes, it is still quite valuable to the ant itself. Why throw it away for nothing? Therefore, ants have every reason to feel that it is going to rain, and go home in time to shelter from the rain before it rains.

As for whether ants will move before it rains, it is a very complicated problem. Even if it is judged by humans, ordinary people will never be accurate. First of all, you should at least measure the terrain height within tens of meters around the ant nest, and then estimate the coming rainfall, the speed of rainfall, the speed of ground seepage and the depth of the ant hole. If the nest is near high slopes, rivers and lakes, it is more difficult to make an accurate judgment. It can be seen that without careful investigation and measurement by corresponding meteorological and water conservancy experts, ordinary people really can't determine whether ants should move.

As we all know, ants are mentally retarded creatures with short visual range. They mainly rely on the sense of smell for group communication, food search and territory definition. Measuring the relative height between your home and a large area around you is a complicated task, and you must rely on good eyesight. It is said that mice are nearsighted, but ants' eyes are shorter than mice, so it is good to be able to see objects a few meters away. Therefore, ants are unlikely to have the instinct to measure the relative height of their homes and large areas around them. As for judging whether your home will be flooded by rain according to the predicted rainfall in the next few days, it is even more difficult to judge. It is difficult for even humans to do this accurately at present. Is it true that meteorologists in the ant colony are better than people and can accurately calculate whether a person's home will be flooded by rain? Do you need to move to avoid being flooded by rain?

There are ant nests almost everywhere, and there are many near my home. I found that whenever there is continuous rainstorm, the vast land is covered with Wang Yang, and for several days, there is deep rain (relative to ants). Looking around, there are many ants whose homes are completely flooded. So, have the nests of ants soaked in deep water for a few days been destroyed? Not at all. As long as the rain clears and the water recedes, busy ants will soon appear at the holes of those ant nests, only to see them busy outside, eating and moving soil, without any signs of heavy casualties. This shows that the nest of ants is not afraid of being soaked in rain for a short time. When the nest is isolated from the atmosphere by rain, the ants in the nest can block the passage in the nest by moving soil, and at the same time move deeper into the nest to avoid the damage caused by rain. In addition, the hydrophobic effect of soil will also lead rainwater to the depths of the ground, and there is no deep hatred between rainwater and ants. Why do you have to stay in the nest and have a hard time with ants? It can be seen that the deep structural characteristics inside the ant nest make it unnecessary for ants to start thinking about whether to move as soon as they feel that it is going to rain.

In order to verify whether the ants in the completely submerged ant nest will be drowned by water, it can also be verified by flooding experiments. The experiment shows that after being flooded for 4 hours, it has no effect on the life of ants in the nest. Since the ants in the flooded nest will not be drowned by water, in the process of biological evolution, there is no need for ants to evolve the instinct of choosing to move before it rains. The choice of biological evolution is often the most scientific choice. In order to prevent the ant nest from being flooded, a more scientific choice should be to build it in a waterproof and flooded place at the beginning of construction, instead of taking the move action of "wasting people and money" again and again. Didn't ants obey the evolutionary choice when they built their nests?

From this point of view, ants moving is not necessarily an action taken by ants worried that their homes will be flooded. It is entirely possible that there are other reasons. One possibility is that there is a shortage of food near the ant nest due to the increase in the number of ant colonies, and it is necessary to find new food sources. After full investigation and preparation, the workers finally found an area with more food, so the ants began to move their families by sending out a certain smell message.

Another possibility is that ants moving is an escape action. Like many other animals, ants are animals that need to seize and protect their territory. When other ant colonies appear near the nest, two ant colonies may have a fierce conflict in order to compete for living space. As a result, the loser lost his original home and took refuge in the "distant place."

Another possibility is that some kinds of ants have the habit of building multiple nests by themselves. When their population is large, they instinctively start to build new nests in order to divert some ants.