Ants may be some of Earth's most powerful biological climate brokers, a provocative new study claims.
The average ant lives and dies in less than a year, but a long-term experiment tracking the insects' effects on soil suggests they cooled Earth's climate as their numbers grew.
"Ants are changing the environment," said lead study author Ronald Dorn, a geologist at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Dorn has discovered that certain ant species "weather" minerals in order to secrete calcium carbonate — better known as limestone. When ants make limestone, the process traps and removes a tiny bit of carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere. Read more...
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