Put an ear to the ground and listen:
The ants are talking.Scientists at Ole Miss say they've discovered for the first time that fire ants communicate by making sounds.
What's more, the scientists have recorded this noise from the underground.
Ant "conversation," amplified thousands of times, is akin to the noise made by fingers rubbing a balloon, but with a faster, steadier beat - a sort of electronic-sounding "eee, eee, eee."
Talking, of course, isn't exactly the right word for what these communic-ants do.
But, "We believe it's possible it may be a `language,"' said Dr. Robert Hickling, associate director of applied research at the National Center for Physical Acoustics at the University of Mississippi.
"One sound would mean, `Go off that way and get some food.' Another sound would be, `Somebody invaded our mound - go out and attack him."'
Scientists say that if the sounds can be decoded and reproduced, they might be used to control the stinging ants, which infest much of the South, including Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, and pose a threat to crops, livestock and pets.
The Ole Miss discovery is startling because entomologists - insect experts - had believed that the small, dark ants communicated almost exclusively through the release of chemicals called phero-mones.
"These ants are not supposed to make sounds," said Dr. Wei Wei (pronounced Way Way), a research associate at the center.
Dr. E.O. Wilson of Harvard University, whose book "The Ants" won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1991, said other ants have been found to communicate through sound, but it had not been noted in fire ants.
Wilson, 66, who is considered the world's leading authority on ants, said the research is significant because fire ants damage crops and destroy beneficial insects, although they sometimes kill harmful insects as well.
Hickling, 63, said the Ole Miss researchers stumbled upon what entomologists had missed for decades simply because "we had the right equipment at the right time."
The ant saga began in March, when the ABC News division called Hickling to ask if the center had any recordings of imported fire ants. The network planned a segment on the rapid spread of the stinging insects, and wanted some ant audio - the sounds of digging, chewing and so on.
The center had no ant recordings, but "we have plenty of fire ant mounds outside," said Wei, 37, who came to Ole Miss seven years ago from Shanghai, China.
The scientists agreed to make the recordings for ABC. Wei inserted a probe with a special microphone into an anthill, and listened. "Instead of normal crawling and walking around, I heard some unique sounds."
Said Hickling: "It was an uproar."
Wei then trapped some ants and took them to a laboratory. The ants were segregated into separate containers, which were placed atop super-sensitive sensors.
The sensors had been developed by the center for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to enable inspectors to listen for insects and larvae inside fruit, pecans, cotton bolls and other agricultural products.
Listening through headphones, Wei became possibly the first person ever to hear the solitary cry of the fire ant.
"I let Dr. Hickling listen, and he's excited - it's definitely like talking or something," Wei said. The noise was especially pronounced when an ant was trapped by the leg - as if it was crying for help.
Wei and Hickling, assisted by research associate Peng Lee, made recordings of the ants. They also checked for any evidence that fire ant noises had been recorded before. They found none.
To the human ear, the ant sounds seem steady and repetitive. But sonograms, which measure sound on a graph, revealed that the noises vary greatly, like human voices. No doubt the ants can detect the variations, Hickling said.