Ants facts

• Some ant colonies, such as the Argentine ant supercolony in Europe, are so complex and large that they span 6,000km.
• Desert ants use the position of the sun; the direction of the wind; the Earth’s magnetic field; and an internal step counter, among other clues, to navigate their barren environments.
• A common field ant can hold up to 5,000 times its body weight using its neck joint.
• A trap-jaw ant can slam its mandibles shut at a super-fast 137km/h.
• The bullet ant’s sting is one of the most painful insect stings for humans to experience, according to the Schmidt pain index.
• Some ants farm fungi, protecting, feeding, and pruning them in underground chambers in return for nutritious snacks. Other ant species herd aphids in a similar way to humans herding cattle, and milk them for sugary excrement.
• Some ants are slave-makers and kidnap the young of other ant species, forcing them to forage and work for them.

Myrmecologists – scientists who study ants – think there are more than 15,700 different species and subspecies of ants, making them one of the most speciated animals in the Animalia kingdom.¹

Their numbers have long dumbfounded experts. So much so, that researchers in 2022 used mathematical modelling to estimate a ballpark figure of how many ants there are in the world: approximately 20 quadrillion.² That number is more than the number of stars in the Milky Way.³ If one were to weigh all of the world’s ants, they’d weigh more than all wild birds and mammals combined.

Despite there being so many species of ants, they always follow the same sort of segmented body plan, like their bee and wasp relatives.⁴ They have six legs, a large head, a smaller thorax, a cinched waist, and a long oval-shaped abdomen. Ants are characterised by antennae which form an angle, like an elbow, and two sets of jaws – a strong outside one for pinching, digging and picking stuff up in a similar way to hands, and a smaller one for munching on food.⁵

Most ants are black, brown, red or yellow. They range in size from as big as an AAA battery, like the giant Amazonian ant which measures up to 4cm, to an ant as small as one of the giant Amazonian ant’s hairs, such as the Carebara atoma, which measures less than a millimetre.⁶

Ants are covered in tiny, bristle-like hairs which they use to sense their surroundings, communicate, and sometimes, to stay cool.⁷ Instead of having a heart like mammals, ants have a single artery which transports colourless blood from the brain to the rest of the body. The males and queens of many species of ants have wings and can fly, but only at a specific time of the year: during mating season.

Ants are abundant the world over. They’re found almost everywhere on the globe except for some really cold places like Antarctica and Greenland. They’re most common in warm, tropical climates: Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, China and Malaysia host the highest number of different species.⁸

Most ant species live in sophisticated nests with chambers and linking tunnels.⁹ These are mostly excavated as holes in the soil, as small mounds on top of the ground, or in trees and stumps. Carpenter ants get their name from their habit of excavating elaborate tunnelled nests in the timber and the wood of human constructions, leaving behind a trail of shavings like that of a pencil sharpener.¹⁰ Weaver ants stitch leaves together and create cocoon-like structures to hide in at the top of trees.¹¹

One subfamily of ants, army ants, is known for being nomadic.¹² These ants move through entire ecosystems in queues that resemble a marching army, carrying their growing larvae with them. When they need to rest because their queen needs to lay eggs, they create nests for repose, as seen in the video below.

Ants are social creatures. They live in large, gregarious groups of hundreds or thousands of ants called colonies or formicaries, where various generations coexist. These are among the most complex social structures in the animal kingdom.

Most ant colonies have three basic hierarchical roles – queens, males, and workers – and all individuals devote their entire existence to the collective well-being of the colony in a specific way.¹³

The queen is the head of the colony and her role is to lay thousands of eggs to populate the community. Male ants mate with the queen. Worker ants are female ants who are in charge of everything else, from protecting the formicary and foraging for food to building the nest and caring for the eggs and larvae. In some species, workers can be split into further subsections too – some specialise in foraging and others in fighting.¹⁴

Some formicaries are so gigantic, they’ve been dubbed ‘supercolonies’. In 2000, researchers discovered a supercolony of Argentine ants made up of 33 different populations interconnected thanks to a convoluted system of underground tunnels.¹⁵ This supercolony stretches from the tip of Portugal to northern Italy over a distance of 6,000km – perhaps more.¹⁶

Ants in a colony are so efficient and tightly knit in how they work and grow in unison that, according to mathematical calculations, they could be thought of as a single superorganism.¹⁷ For instance, researchers think that ant colonies as a whole can pass information on from generation to generation – with no single animal actually having all of the information about the bigger picture – in a sort of collective memory.¹⁸

In most ant species, one ant queen is in charge of all procreation. Mating usually happens during a mating ritual called a nuptial flight, where all the males fly into the air to mate with one queen, who will select one or a few companions.¹⁹ For some ants, this swarming is so big, it’s been mistaken as rain on weather forecasts.²⁰

After this bonanza, all the males die, having fulfilled their role. The queen – if she doesn’t get eaten or die on her way to the refuge, which is extremely likely – will rip off her wings, make herself a new nest, and kickstart a new colony.

This one-time sex spree will be enough for the queen to store the sperm and lay eggs for the rest of her life.²¹ She will first give birth to the worker bees in order to grow her empire, and then, once the colony has grown large enough, give birth to more batches of males and queens who will replicate the mating dance, and settle into a new nest for a new colony.

This is just a blueprint for colony building, though. There are species of ants where each colony has several queens contributing to growing the progeny, such as some carpenter ants and Argentine ants.²² Some researchers think this is better for colony survival.²³ In the Formica yessensis of Japan, a colony can have up to a million queens. In Indian jumping ant colonies, when a queen dies, a worker takes her spot by shrinking her brain and expanding her ovaries to fulfill the reproductive duty.²⁴ If she’s dethroned, she then can shrink her ovaries and expand her brain again, returning to her role of worker ant.

Ants have several distinct stages of development in their lives, a process which usually takes up to a couple of months.²⁵ 

It all starts when a queen ant lays a number of eggs that look like tiny, sticky grains of rice. After one or two weeks, worm-like larvae with no legs or eyes hatch. Fed on the queen’s saliva, other unfertilised eggs and food that other ants have brought to the nest for them, they fatten and grow quickly, shedding several layers of skin.²⁶ 

Thanks to being nourished, the larvae become pupae: they sprout eyes, eggs and antennae but are still cocooned and reliant on others for food.²⁷ This last phase lasts for six to 10 weeks, after which they’re ready to become adults and fulfill their duty in the colony.

The fertilised eggs will have grown into female ants, while males will have come from the unfertilised ones instead – something that happens in bees and wasps too.²⁸ 

Ants are brilliant navigators. Army ants – known for travelling far and wide because they’re nomadic – have evolved to be inventive. If there’s a hole in the road they’re travelling on, these ants will literally plug it with their body so that others can pass over unperturbed.²⁹ If the gaps are large, they will build bridges by linking their bodies together, dynamically adjusting the bridge size and shape depending on the number of colleagues who need to come by.³⁰

In the case of Amazon fire ants, if their underground nests flood from tropical storms, thousands of the ants will interlock their legs to form a giant raft of bodies on the water’s surface, enveloping the queen and young in the driest centre of their ‘barge’.³¹

Desert ants – who live in barren, harsh deserts and salt pans in the Sahara, the Namib Desert and the Australian Outback – are thought to use the position of the sun as a compass, as well as using the Earth’s magnetic field and the direction of the wind.³² After carrying out an experiment where the tiny critters were placed on stilts, researchers discovered that the ants also have an internal step counter, like a pedometer.³³ These ants also build landmark mounds on their nests to help them find their home after returning from long foraging journeys.³⁴

Don’t be fooled by their small frame: ants are frequently famished. They’re omnivorous and eat everything, from parts of plants and flowers, fungi and seeds to insects, insect eggs, earthworms and slugs. They even eat some amphibians, birds, reptiles and small mammals. Ants also use their ingenious teamwork skills to overpower prey hundreds of times their size, using their strong outer mandibles to snip away at soft flesh.³⁵ 

Harvester ants store berries, seeds, and grass in pantry-like rooms in their nests.³⁶ In 2022, scientists discovered their pupae also secrete a form of milk-like liquid that provides nutrients for older ants to consume.³⁷

Solid food is most often fed to hungry larvae, with adult ants eating a regurgitated version of the same meal instead. This process is called trophallaxis.³⁸ This practice is widespread among ant colonies and between workers too, being helpful for communication and allowing ants to share chemical signals.³⁹ This is why ants have two stomachs: one for digesting their food, and one for keeping food for others.

In some species, some worker ants become ‘repletes’ – ants storing liquid nutrients in their gut to share with other ants when availability of food is scarce.⁴⁰ This is especially true for honeypot ants, who get their endearing name because they gorge on a liquid excreted by aphids called honeydew. These repletes lap up so much honeydew that they fatten until their abdomen is like a little orange pearl and they cannot move or leave the nest.⁴¹ They then hang from their roof until it’s time to regurgitate some of the stored contents for their nestmates.

Ants aren’t just skilled foragers and hunters: they’re known for having a keen eye for farming fungi or aphids too. They’ve been doing this for more than 60 million years now.⁴²

Leafcutter ants look for fresh leaves to rip off and carry back to their nests.⁴³ But they don’t eat these leaves. They chew away at them and then feed the gnawed bits to gardens of fungi that they’ve grown in subterranean chambers of their nests.⁴⁴ They nourish and tend to the fungi with care, protecting them from other fungi, moulds and pests, and by using bacteria and enzymes in their spit, urine and faeces as fertilisers for the fungi.⁴⁵ Some species also grow bacteria to use as pesticides. The fungi digest these harsh greens that the ants would struggle to assimilate, and then excrete them in nutrient-rich clusters for the ants to nibble away at with ease.

Herder ants, on the other hand, farm sap-eating aphids for their honeydew – in a similar way to humans herding cattle. These ants trap the aphids on plant stems close to their nest and then stroke them on their gut to make them secrete a sugary liquid meal. To keep them hostage, ants resort to all sorts of creative techniques: they bite the wings off aphids to keep them from leaving, and secrete luring chemicals from their feet to sedate them.⁴⁶

Both of these farming strategies can be thought of as examples of symbiotic relationships: the fungi and aphids receive protection and shelter in return for their feed.

Although ants are industrious and hardworking, serving their colony every moment of their life, several species go about this task more mischievously. They enslave ants from other species for the duties of caring for their young and foraging for food.⁴⁷ Some could live without slave-making, while others are obligated social parasites: they need to enslave others to survive because they’ve lost their ability to take care of themselves.⁴⁸

Species such as blood-red ants, Temnothorax americanus ants, and Polyergus lucidus ants raid the nests of other ants and steal their pupae, raising and grooming them as their own workers and making them forage on their behalf.⁴⁹

Tiny ants can pull off feats of super-strength and super-speed.

Some worker ants can carry up to 50 times the weight of their bodies, and most ants can carry at least 10 times their weight. Some studies have suggested the ant’s strength lies in its joints – its neck joint specifically – which, in the case of the common field ant, can hold up to 5,000 times its body weight.⁵⁰

Saharan silver ants can run 100 times their body length in just one second, Trap-jaw ants can slam their pinchers shut so quickly, the motion is one of the fastest movements recorded by an animal, at an astonishing 137km/h.⁵¹

Some species of ants spray a toxic chemical called formic acid from their abdomen to scare away predators or neutralise prey.⁵² Studies suggest ants may also spray formic acid to disinfect their nests, as well as ingest the poison to disinfect their bodies and guts.⁵³

Red fire ants are aggressive ants that sting using their abdomen. They inject a venom called solenopsin into anything that threatens them, causing humans instant pain and skin irritation.

But the large, arboreal bullet ant holds the title for most painful of ants, and possibly most painful of insects, according to the Schmidt pain index.⁵⁴ This pain scale was devised by entomologist Justin Schmidt, who let himself be stung by most bees, wasps and ants on the planet. He described the bullet ant’s sting as “like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.”⁵⁵

Many ants live in environments and ecosystems that aren’t really theirs to begin with –they’re ‘invasive’ or ‘alien’ species, and they’ve often hitched a ride to new territories in unassuming human cargo. This is a widely spread phenomenon. In 2023, experts estimated that more than 500 species of ants reside in places they’re not supposed to be in.⁵⁶

Invasive species can wreak havoc on the locations they visit, because they can disrupt some of the balanced, well-established relationships which already exist between organisms of these ecosystems, and leech off their resources. Some experts call ants, “amongst the most destructive and widespread invaders across the globe.”⁵⁷

Despite many being invasive, several species of ants are still absolutely crucial for the world’s thriving ecosystems.⁵⁸ Like earthworms, they aerate the soil with their holes, making sure it stays well replenished of oxygen. They eat decaying organic matter and help the ground to recycle nutrients from nature. By moving around with kernels and leaf litter over large distances, they also help with seed dispersal and the propagation of many species of vegetation.

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