According to study, ants convert carbon dioxide into minerals

Ants have a working model that is generally used in many metaphors, as these insects are organized and have well-defined functions - such as tunnel maintenance, food collection and storage, defense of colonies against invaders, among other tasks. Scientists have recently discovered another curious fact about ants: they are capable of converting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

First of all, we need to remember some facts. At geological time scales, Earth has a convenient regulator on its thermostat: the wear and tear of many minerals. These minerals react with carbon dioxide, which produces the so-called carbonate. Depending on climatic regions, more or less amounts of CO ₂ are released into the atmosphere, which can increase or decrease planetary temperatures.

This process is very complex and there are several elements that participate in it (whether living organisms or not), and quantifying the biological influences of all these factors is a real challenge. However, one of them went completely unnoticed for many years: the ants. You will already understand the meaning of this ...

The Effects of Weathering

Ronald Dorn is a student of weathering, which is the set of physical and chemical phenomena that lead to the degradation and weakening of rocks. At the beginning of his studies, Dorn was advised to do a long-term project as they are quite scarce in this field and take a long time to reach conclusions. It was then that Dorn began a 25-year study that revealed impressive data.

He mixed basalt with sand from Hawaii and searched for various places to bury different packages, such as the Catalina Mountains in Arizona and the Palo Duro Canyon in Texas. The sandy basalt was buried in half-meter holes in very diverse environments, such as deserts, regions near trees and ant colonies. At every five-year interval, Dorn collected samples of buried material to visualize the changes occurring and the degree of weathering that the particles suffered over time.

Ants may be more important than we think

As the weathering action produces carbonate, the quantities of carbonate at all points where the basalt was buried were also analyzed. This is where the unexpected result was realized: the material collected near the ant colonies stood out significantly. Sandy basalt collected near trees suffered between 10 and 40 times more weathering than the base materials, which confirmed that the trees and their symbiotic fungi help in the process of breaking down the minerals.

In ant colonies, however, the weathering identified was between 50 and 175 times more intense than in the base materials. The colonies also accumulated large amounts of carbon, something that was not so noticeable in samples buried in other regions, which may corroborate the high rate of wear of rocks in contact with insects.

Since no one has studied mineral weathering in ant colonies before, it is not possible to know how the process is occurring in detail. All we know is that ants move bits of earth to and fro, and apparently they convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into underground minerals.