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Ants, A Quick Picker-upper
More than 200 bird species grab ants and rub them over their wing and tail feathers, or sit down amid a group of ants and let the little creatures crawl all over them. Although ornithologists have observed this odd behavior, called "anting," for more than 65 years, few agree on exactly why it occurs, but they have several hypotheses. The formic acid exuded by ants may help birds repel lice and other ectoparasites, or protect the birds from infection. Maybe the acid tingles and soothes skin irritation when birds molt. Or, anting might remove unpalatable substances, such as formic acid, from ants so the birds can eat them.
Most anting episodes have been observed in songbirds from temperate areas, including jays, crows, dippers, towhees, sparrows, orioles, tanagers, grackles, and robins. But the late Neotropical ornithologist Alexander F. Skutch and others have caught tropical birds in the act, including woodcreepers, saltators, seedeaters, and flycatchers. Temperate birds typically ant on or near the ground, while tropical birds usually ant in bushes and trees.
Ants are not the only species used for anting: Birds also rub millipedes, flowers, mothballs, and caterpillars against their wing and tail feathers and skin. Following his description in the Wilson Bulletin in 1998 of a Costa Rican three-striped warbler (Basileuterus tristriatus) that repeatedly rubbed a caterpillar over its wings and afterward vigorously wiped its bill on a twig, biologist Dan Wenny, then at the University of Florida, wrote that "anting remains one of the unexplained puzzles of ornithology. The available information is dominated by anecdotal observations (such as this one)." Wenny added that "the few experiments thus far have reached conflicting conclusions, perhaps because each has tested only one of the hypothesized functions."
—Howard Youth
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ZooGoer 36(4) 2007. Copyright 2007 Friends of the National Zoo.
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