Do Ants Make Noise?
While we typically don’t hear them, ants do in fact make noise. By using their bodies, they make chirp-like sounds which they use to communicate with each other.
These sounds are high-pitched yet aren’t necessarily loud and are therefore, quite hard to hear. They are however, in our audible range and so we too can perceive these sounds especially when they’re amplified.
In this article we’ll discuss how and why ants make noise.
How Do Ants Make Noise?
Unlike us humans and other mammals, ants don’t have vocal chords and can’t speak. Instead, they make use of their bodies to produce sound in 2 ways: drumming and stridulation.
Drumming. Drumming is a form of sound production which involves an ant repeatedly knocking its body, usually the gaster, on a substrate such as a wall or the ground. This produces a noise that could mimic the sound produced by aggressive wasps which scare off predators. Likewise, it also sends off vibrations through the substrate which other ants could detect.
Stridulation. Stimulation is considered to be a sophisticated sound-producing behavior which produces the chirp-like sound that ants make. Instead of violently striking the substrate, ants produce this sound by rubbing parts of their body together. More specifically, ants move their bodies around in such a way that two sections of their gaster, one with ridges and the other with a scraper, rub against each other.
Why Do Ants Make Noise?
It’s quite intriguing why ants have 2 different ways of making noise when most scientists agree that they’re deaf. What’s the point of creating a sound if they can’t even hear it?
Well, even if ants aren’t capable of hearing air-borne sounds, they’re able to detect them through substrate-borne vibrations. This means that they can essentially hear through vibrations transmitted via solid objects.
What’s more interesting is not only can they detect vibrations, but they can also interpret them and react accordingly. For example, drumming is used to produce an alarm signal whenever there’s a disturbance to the colony nest. It allows ants to notify their colony mates which then react by either becoming immobile or by speeding up and moving towards the source of the vibration.
On the other hand, stridulation is used in 3 different ways. These ways are as follows:
Alarm Signal. Like with drumming, ants may use stridulation to send out alarm signals. For example, some ant species stridulate when they get buried or trapped so as to call for help.
Mating Signal. Stridulation has also been observed during the mating process of young Pogonomyrmex queens. When the spermatheca of these queens get filled they send out stridulatory signals to stop mating which then allows them to escape the swarm and head to safety.
Complement to Pheromones. Lastly, research has discovered that some ants use stridulation to complement communication via pheromones when recruiting nestmates for food finds or to elicit movement upon finding new nest sites.
Related Questions
Do Ants Make Vocal Noises?
Ants don’t make vocal noises. Again, ants don’t have vocal chords and can’t speak like us humans. Instead, they make use of their bodies, by either striking a substrate or rubbing parts of the gaster together, to make sound.
Can Ants Hear?
Most scientists believe that ants are deaf and can only perceive sounds through substrate-borne vibrations. However, a recent study suggests that ants, through their antennae, are in fact capable of hearing airborne sounds in the near field where sounds are amplified.
How Do Ants Communicate?
Ants mostly communicate through chemical signals called pheromones. They use these pheromones to leave trails when foraging, identifying colony mates, and even identifying the dead.
Also, as discussed, ants also communicate and send different types of signals through sound vibrations which pass through the substrate.
Summary
Ants are by no means noisy creatures. In fact to us humans, they probably seem really quiet as we rarely hear them even if we can find them pretty much everywhere. Get close enough though, and you’ll soon find out that they aren’t as silent as we believe them to be.
Ants actually make high-pitched chirps and other sounds by drumming or stridulating. They use these sounds to communicate and send signals to their nestmates and sometimes to scare off predators.
