People from all over the internet send me strange photos and videos of ants all the time. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Most of the time I can explain what the ants are doing but this one has me stumped.
The ants seem to be removing the buttons from a flannel shirt and taking them away, presumably to their nest. All I can think of is that some buttons are made of horn or bone and maybe the ants want to gnaw on it for protein?
Sadly in this day and age it could be fake, but the way the ants are moving the button is realistic. Can you identify the language? It’d help to know the region to attempt to identify them. They could be Messor or maybe Pheidole.
One thing that makes less sense is the location of the tree where the ants are moving down seems disconnected from the branch where the shirt is located.
Maybe the person spilt something sugary onto themself. They hung up the jacket to dry it, and then the ants were attracted to the sugar. This could make the buttons potentially have a residue of sugar on them, so the ants try to transport them back to their nest?
If the ants collect seeds with elaiosomes this would not be such a surprising reaction to a hard object with a delicious part that’s sticky and hard to remove.
The language is Russian. Someone on a Russian page commented that the buttons are made of casein. That’s not likely to be the explanation, though. Industrial casein plastic (Galalith) included formaldehyde, AI tells me.
On wikipedia they explain how this material can be made from milk fat. That might be the answer. Some species of Messor live in the eastern and southern parts of Russia and these ants love to collect seeds. So this may be our solution.
Casein is milk protein
Galalith for the buttons – resists humidity to a certain degree – so if the weather was damp, maybe an appealing protein source ?
I heard what sound like “чем” and “пуговица”, which means “button”, so it’s Russian, another Slavic language, or a language that borrowed the word from Russian. (I was in the play Ревизор in college; there’s a character called Пуговицин.)