蚂蚁是一种昆虫。属于节肢动物门，昆虫纲，膜翅目，蚁科。蚂蚁有很多种，英语里也有关于蚂蚁的短文。你想知道描写蚂蚁的英语作文是怎么写的吗？这里有一些边肖收集的关于蚂蚁的英语作文。让我们来看看！
描写蚂蚁的英语作文篇一：
The Ant and the Dove
An ant is walking by the river. He looks at the river and says to himself, "How nice and cool this water looks! I must drink some of it." But when he is drinking, he slips into the river.
"Oh.Help!Help!" The ant cries,
A dove is sitting in the tree. She hears him and throws him a leaf, "Climb up that leaf," she says "and you will float bank."
The ant climbs uo onto the leaf, and the wind blows the leaf to the bank. And the ant is saved.
"Thank you, Dove. You're so kind," The ant says and runs home, "You have saved my life, and I wish I could do something for you, Goodbye!"
"Goodbye!" says the dove, "Be careful. Not to fall into the river again."
After a few days, the dove is building her nest. And a man is raising his gun to shoot her.
The ant sees this, and runs quickly to bite the man's leg. "Ouch! Ouch!" The man feels pained and drops his gun. The dove hears and flies away. So the man picks up his gun and leave.
The dove comes to her nest. "Thank you, my little friend," she says, "You have saved my life."
The little ant is so glad, because he can help the dove.
蚂蚁和鸽子
一只蚂蚁在河边散步。他看见喝水自言自语道："这河水看上去真清凉啊!我要去喝点。"可是他在喝水的时候，一不小心滑进河里了。
"啊!救命!救命!'蚂蚁叫喊着。
一只鸽子正呆在树上，听见呼救声，就扔给他一片树叶。"快爬到树叶上去。她说："你会漂到岸上的。"
"谢谢你，鸽子。你真善良。"蚂蚁一边说一边向家跑，"你就了我的命，我会奥达你的。再见!"
"再见!小心别掉进河里了。"鸽子说。
几天后，鸽子正在筑巢，一个人举着枪要打鸽子。蚂蚁看见了，迅速地跑过去，在那个人的腿上咬了一口。"啊呀!哎呀!"那个人疼得扔掉枪。鸽子听见了，连忙飞走了。那个人只好捡起枪，走了。
鸽子又飞回巢里。"谢谢你，我的小朋友。"鸽子说，"你救了我的命。"
小蚂蚁可高兴了，因为他也帮助了鸽子。
描写蚂蚁的英语作文篇二：
Make a left at the big oak tree about a mile down the road. That kind of direction is common in landscapes filled with visual cues. But the Sahara desert is a much tougher place to navigate. Even any footprints you leave get erased as winds massage the sand. Nevertheless, ants in the desert go on searches for food—and once they find it they carry their prize directly back to the nest.
In the late 1980's, researchers discovered that the ants can achieve this impressive feat using a process called path integration. To gauge the direction home, they keep track of the sun's motion across the sky—just like sailors used to do. To calculate the distance, they count their steps.
"It's a very hostile environment. They're foraging at the hottest times of the day and it's a desert, so surface temperatures reach 60 to 70 degrees Celsius."
Neurobiologist Matthias Wittlinger from Germany's Ulm University, on the podcast of the journal Science, which published this work.
"And they need to be really quick in finding food, and they really need to be very quick in getting the food back to the nest…they need to be really fast, and they're travelling at speeds of 100 body lengths per second."
Wittlinger noticed that sometimes desert ants carry each other.
"And here we had this unique opportunity to test traveling ants that are not walking."
If they're not walking, then they can't count their steps. So would these ants be able to find their way home?、
Bees and wasps can't count their steps, because they fly. Instead, to estimate distance they rely on what's called optic flow, which tracks how much visual information flows past them while they travel. So, do carried ants also use optic flow?
To find out, the researchers waited for an ant to emerge from its nest carrying another. After the pair walked for ten meters, the researchers separated them. And impressively, the carried ant marched straight on back to the nest—but not if their vision was blocked.
"So if they were blindfolded while being carried, they have no chance of gaining any distance information."
Which proves that they need eyesight—and therefore optic flow—to do it.
These critters live in one of the harshest environments on the planet, so it makes sense that evolution endowed them with the tools for path integration and optic flow.
"In the case of the desert ant, it's really important that they're getting navigation right…if one system fails, you still have a backup system."
Because if you're going to live in the desert you have to be very clever in finding ways to not die in the desert.
沿着这条路走，在大约一英里处的大橡树那里左拐。这种导航方向在有视觉线索的地形非常常见。但是撒哈拉沙漠是一个很难导航的地方。即使你留下脚印也会被风沙覆盖。然而，在沙漠中的蚂蚁却能够继续寻找食物，一旦它们发现食物，它们可以直接把食物搬回巢穴中。
上世纪80年代后期，研究人员发现蚂蚁可以实现这一了不起的壮举，这被称为路径整合。蚂蚁跟踪太阳在天空中的运动情况来判断回家的方向，就像过去水手们做的一样。它们通过计算步数来计算距离。
“这是一个非常恶劣的环境。它们在一天最热的时间觅食，沙漠的表面温度高达60到70摄氏度。”
德国乌尔姆大学的神经生物学家马蒂亚斯·威特林格在本周《科学》期刊的播客上发表了这项研究成果。
“它们要快速找到食物，还要快速把食物带回巢穴……它们的动作要非常快，基本上它们每秒的速度要达到身长的100倍。”
威特林格指出，有时沙漠蚂蚁会互相背着前进。
“我们有这个独特的机会来测试那些没有走路的觅食蚂蚁。”
如果它们不走路，那它们就不能计算步数。那这些蚂蚁能找到回家的路吗?
蜜蜂和黄蜂不能数步数，因为它们靠飞行移动。所以，它们依靠光流来计算距离，它们会根据飞行过程中的视觉信息流来估算距离。那被抬着的蚂蚁也用光流来计算距离吗?
为了弄清楚这点，研究人员等待一只蚂蚁背着另一只蚂蚁从它的巢里出现。在它们走了十米以后，研究人员把它们分开了。令人印象深刻地是，如果视野受阻，那被背着的蚂蚁会径直返回巢穴中。
“如果它们在被背着时眼睛被蒙住，那它们就没有机会获得任何有关距离的信息。”
这证明它们需要视力，也就是要它们需要光流。
这些生物生活在地球最恶劣的环境中，所以进化赋予它们路径整合和光流的能力是有道理的。
“在沙漠蚂蚁的例子中，获得导航能力是非常重要的……如果一个系统失败，它们还有一个备份系统。”
因为如果要在沙漠中生活，你必须要非常聪明，这样才能找到路而避免死在沙漠中。
描写蚂蚁的英语作文篇三：
Next time you need directions, maybe ask an ant. Because these clever little critters are such masters of navigation that some can find their way home… whether they're walking forward, backward, or sideways. That's according to a study in the journal Current Biology.
Ants often travel long distances—well, for them—when they're searching for food to bring back to their nests. And their built-in GPS appears to function just fine even when they wind up having to travel in reverse because they're dragging a huge morsel. But how do these backward bugs know where they're going?
To find out, researchers went to Spain to mess with some desert ants. They found an active nest and surrounded it with barriers that forced the foraging ants to follow a particular path back home. Once the ants were familiar with the maze, the researchers would scoop them up…hand them a cookie crumb…and then put them back in a different location…one that required taking a 90 degree turn to get to the nest.
What the researchers saw was that the ants that were carting a small, easy-to-carry crumb would dash forward with confidence and were able to hook a right and head on home. Presumably because they could see where they were going and recognized the route.
But some of their nest-mates were given a cookie crumb so large that they had to travel aft-first, pulling their prize behind them. These ants would set off in the correct general direction. But those that stuck with going in reverse would miss the turnoff to the nest.
Some of the rearward ants, however, stopped to get their bearings. They would drop the cookie and turn around to take a look at the landscape. This quick peek allowed the six-legged savants to reset their inner maps. So that after turning back around to grab their cookies they headed in the right direction, even going back-end first.
The ants-in-reverse appear to use celestial cues…like the position of the sun…to keep them on the straight and narrow. When the researchers used a mirror to make it look like the sun was on the other side of the sky, the beleaguered backward ants would turn tail for the opposite direction.
So ants integrate a lot of information…about local landmarks, the position of the sun, and where their bodies are situated in space…to successfully bring home the bacon… all while going backwards.
Lead author Antoine Wystrach, a CNRS researcher at the University of Toulouse 3, adds:
"This behavior is interesting in itself, as it implies a synergy between at least three types of memory: the long-term memories of the route sceneries, the memory of the new direction to follow, and the memory of the cookie left behind."
下次你需要辨别方向时，也许可以问问蚂蚁。因为这些聪明的小生物是导航专家，无论它们向前走、向后走或是走小路，一些蚂蚁总能找到回家的路。该研究结果发表在《当代生物学》期刊上。
蚂蚁在寻找食物并把食物带回巢穴时经常要长途跋涉，对它们来说算是很远的距离了。它们身体里内置的定位系统运行良好，甚至在它们因为拖着一个巨大的食物碎屑而不得不掉头回家时也能正常发挥功能。但是，这些向后掉头的蚂蚁是如何知道它们要去哪里的呢?
为了找到答案，研究人员前往西班牙对一些沙漠蚂蚁进行了研究。他们发现了一个活跃的巢穴，他们用障碍物把这个巢穴围了起来，这迫使觅食蚂蚁沿着一条特定的路径回家。一旦这些蚂蚁熟悉了这种迷宫式的路线，研究人员就会把它们拿起来，给它们一块饼干碎屑，然后再把它们放到一个不同的位置，这个位置需要90度转弯才能返回巢穴。
研究人员发现，那些拿着小块且容易携带的食物碎屑的蚂蚁自信地向前突进，而且它们能找到正确的回家方向。这可能是因为它们能看到它们要去的地方并能识别出路线。
可是巢穴中有些同伴得到的是非常大的食物碎屑，所以它们不得不拖着食物跟着前面的蚂蚁走。这些蚂蚁可以朝着正确的方向前进。但是那些坚持往反方向走的蚂蚁则会错过回巢穴的岔道。
不过，后面的一些蚂蚁会停下来寻找方向。它们会扔下食物，转身查看一下四周的情况。这种快速查看可以使六条腿的蚂蚁重置地图。然后它们会转回去拿起它们的饼干碎屑，随后向着正确的方向前进，它们甚至能最先返回巢穴。
这些反转的蚂蚁似乎利用了天空中的线索，比如太阳的位置等，来使它们保持正确的路线。当研究人员用镜子让太阳看起来像在天空的另一边时，落后的蚂蚁会因为受到困扰而掉头向相反的方向前进。
所以，蚂蚁整合了大量信息，比如当地地标、太阳的位置、以及它们自己在空间中的位置等等，然后才能成功地把肉带回家。
该文章的第一作者安东尼·外斯奇是图卢兹第三大学法国国家科学研究中心的研究员，他补充道：
“这个行为本身就很有趣，因为它说明了至少三种类型的记忆之间的协同现象：路线周边的长期记忆、向新方向走的记忆，以及此前曾留下食物的记忆。”
描写蚂蚁的英语作文篇四：
蚂蚁智力
Collective intelligence: Ants and brain's neurons
STANFORD—An individual ant is not very bright, but ants in a colony, operating as a collective, do remarkable things.
A single neuron in the human brain can respond only to what the neurons connected to it are doing, but all of them together can be Immanuel Kant.
That resemblance is why Deborah M. Gordon, StanfordUniversity assistant professor of biological sciences, studies ants.
"I'm interested in the kind of system where simple units together do behave in complicated ways," she said.
No one gives orders in an ant colony, yet each ant decides what to do next.
For instance, an ant may have several job descriptions. When the colony discovers a new source of food, an ant doing housekeeping duty may suddenly become a forager. Or if the colony's territory size expands or contracts, patroller ants change the shape of their reconnaissance pattern to conform to the new realities. Since no one is in charge of an ant colony—including the misnamed "queen," which is simply a breeder—how does each ant decide what to do?
This kind of undirected behavior is not unique to ants, Gordon said. How do birds flying in a flock know when to make a collective right turn? All anchovies and other schooling fish seem to turn in unison, yet no one fish is the leader.
Gordon studies harvester ants in Arizona and, both in the field and in her lab, the so-called Argentine ants that are ubiquitous to coastal California.
Argentine ants came to Louisiana in a sugar shipment in 1908. They were driven out of the Gulf states by the fire ant and invaded California, where they have displaced most of the native ant species. One of the things Gordon is studying is how they did so. No one has ever seen an ant war involving the Argentine species and the native species, so it's not clear whether they are quietly aggressive or just find ways of taking over food resources and territory.
The Argentine ants in her lab also are being studied to help her understand how they change behavior as the size of the space they are exploring varies.
"The ants are good at finding new places to live in and good at finding food," Gordon said. "We're interested in finding out how they do it."
Her ants are confined by Plexiglas walls and a nasty glue-like substance along the tops of the boards that keeps the ants inside. She moves the walls in and out to change the arena and videotapes the ants' movements. A computer tracks each ant from its image on the tape and reads its position so she has a diagram of the ants' activities.
The motions of the ants confirm the existence of a collective.
"A colony is analogous to a brain where there are lots of neurons, each of which can only do something very simple, but together the whole brain can think. None of the neurons can think ant, but the brain can think ant, though nothing in the brain told that neuron to think ant."
For instance, ants scout for food in a precise pattern. What happens when that pattern no longer fits the circumstances, such as when Gordon moves the walls?
"Ants communicate by chemicals," she said. "That's how they mostly perceive the world; they don't see very well. They use their antennae to smell. So to smell something, they have to get very close to it.
"The best possible way for ants to find everything—if you think of the colony as an individual that is trying to do this—is to have an ant everywhere all the time, because if it doesn't happen close to an ant, they're not going to know about it. Of course, there are not enough ants in the colony to do that, so somehow the ants have to move around in a pattern that allows them to cover space efficiently."
Keeping in mind that no one is in charge of a colony and that there is no central plan, how do the ants adjust their reconnaissance if their territory expands or shrinks?
"No ant told them, 'OK, guys, if the arena is 20 by 20…' Somehow there has to be some rule that individual ants use in deciding to change the shape of their paths so they cover the areas effectively. I think that that rule is the rate in which they bump into each other."
The more crowded they are, the more often each ant will bump into another ant. If the area of their territory is expanded, the frequency of contact decreases. Perhaps, Gordon thinks, each ant has a threshold for normality and adjusts its path shape depending on how often the number of encounters exceeds or falls short of that threshold.
If the territory shrinks, the number of contacts increases and the ant alters its search pattern. If it expands, contact decreases and it alters the pattern a different way.
In the Arizona harvester ants, Gordon studies tasks besides patrolling. Each ant has a job.
"I divide the tasks into four: foraging, nest maintenance, midden [piling refuse, including husks of seeds] and patrolling—patrollers are the ones that come out first in the morning and look for food. The foragers go where the patrollers find food.
"The colony has about eight different foraging paths. Every day it uses several of them. The patrollers go out first on the trails and they attract each other when they find food. By the end of an hour's patrolling, most patrollers are on just a few trails… All the foragers have to do is go where there are the most patrollers."
Each ant has its prescribed task, but the ants can switch tasks if the collective needs it. An ant on housekeeping duty will decide to forage. No one told it to do so and Gordon and other entomologists don't know how that happens.
"No ant can possibly know how much food everybody is collecting, how many foragers are needed," she said. "An ant has to have very simple rules that tell it, 'OK, switch and start foraging.' But an ant can't assess globally how much food the colony needs.
"I've done perturbation experiments in which I marked ants according to what task they're doing on a given day. The ants that were foraging for food were green, those that were cleaning the nest were blue and so on. Then I created some new situation in the environment; for example, I create a mess that the nest maintenance workers have to clean up or I'll put out extra food that attracts more foragers.
"It turns out that ants that were marked doing a certain task one day switch to do a different task when conditions change."
Of about 8,000 species of ants, only about 10 percent have been studied thus far.
"It's hard to generalize anything about the behavior of ants," Gordon said. "Most of what we know about ants is true of a very, very small number of species compared to the number of species out there."