Ants may be tiny
creatures, but they have a lot more to them than meets the eye. What they lack
in size they make up for in intelligence, cleverness, and other surprising
qualities. Some aren’t even that tiny! So, let’s look at these twenty
interesting facts about ants!
1.
It has been estimated
that there are approximately ten trillion ants living on Earth at any given
time.
2.
The largest ant ever
discovered measured was the Titanomyrma Giganteum. It was 2.4 inches with a
wingspan of 6 inches.
3.
Some species of ant
have no need for males. The species Mycocepurus Smithii, are
completely made up of females. Their queens are able to reproduce clones and do
not need to reproduce normally.
4.
Ants have been around
since the age of dinosaurs. The ant species first evolved approximately 130
million years ago during the Cretaceous Period.
5.
Ants are pretty tough.
They have survived one mass extinction event already. About 65 million years
ago when the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event happened, the collision
between the earth and a large heavenly body ended the age of the dinosaurs, but
spread ant specimen across the globe. This even, in a way, only made the ants
stronger.
6.
Army ants do not have
permanent homes and farm like other ants, but instead they gather food during
periods of migration.
7.
Some worker ants are
given the job of cleaning trash or unwanted items from the nest and taking them
outside to designate trash piles – Ants are so clean!
8.
The biomass of all the
ants around the world is equivalent to the biomass of all human beings around
the world.
9.
The human brain consists of
10,000 million brain cells and an ant brain has 250,00 brain cells. 40,000 ant
brains all together could make up for one human brain.
10.
Ants can form
super-colonies that can stretch for miles. Ant colonies have their own chemical
profiles that helps ants determine if an ant is part of the colony or a
stranger. An example of a super-colony, where ants sharing the same chemical
profile cover a wide area, would be the Argentine ants. These ants inhabit
every continent in the world except Antarctica.
11.
Don’t let worker ants
fool you into thinking that all ants are hardworking individuals. Turns out
fire ants are very prone to dozing off. Worker fire-ants have about 253 minute
long sleep episodes a day. Fire ant queens sleep 92 times a day and 6 minutes
each time. A little over 9 hours of nap time for the queen, almost 5 hours for
her subjects.
12.
Soldier ants protect
their nests by plugging the entrances with their heads.
13.
Some ants can support
50 to 100 times their own weight. Even while hanging upside-down on
the underside of glass.
14.
Ants began farming 50
million years before human beings. About 70 million years ago the earlier ants
began farming fungus. They even secreted antibiotic chemicals onto their fungus
crop and fertilized it with manure.
15.
Ants have the longest
lifespan of any insect – 30 years!
16.
Male ants normally
only live to mate with the queen ant and afterwards they die.
17.
Ants can have their
own slaves! Sometimes a queen ant will kill the queen of another colony similar
to her species and use its workers to bring in her eggs. Other times an ant
colony will steal eggs from other nests and raise those ants to be workers for
the colony.
18.
Termites and ants are
often confused. The difference between the two is that Ants are thin in the
middle and Termites are not.
19.
Some species of ant
are venomous and the most venomous ant known is the Harvester ant. It’s even
the most venomous of all insects.
20.
There is a fungus
called Ophiocordyceps that infects an ant until the infection reaches the ant’s
brain. When the infection is in the brain the fungus takes control of the ant’s
mind. The fungus will make the ant go to a leaf and clamp its mandibles into it
while the fungus develops. Eventually spores eject from the ants exoskeleton,
infecting more ants.
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