48 Fun Facts About Ants

Ants belong to the same insect order as which of these?

Wasps share the order Hymenoptera with ants and bees, and ants evolved from wasp-like ancestors. The furry insects known as velvet ants are not ants at all but wingless female wasps.

A 2022 study estimated that roughly how many ants are alive on Earth?

20 quadrillion, which works out at about 2.5 million ants for every person alive. Together they are thought to outweigh all the world's wild birds and mammals combined.

Which US state is believed to have had no ants at all until people brought them?

Hawaii lies so far from any continent that ants never reached it on their own. Every one of the dozens of species living there today arrived with people.

The original West Germanic meaning of the word ant was what?

The biter, or strictly 'the biter-off', from Germanic roots meaning 'off' and 'cut'. Another old English name for the insect, pismire, is said to come from the urine-like smell of an anthill.

The scientific study of ants is called what?

Myrmecology takes its name from myrmex, the Greek for ant. Its most famous figure, E. O. Wilson, worked out how ants recognise their dead and carry them out of the nest.

Entomologists use the formal term gyne for which member of an ant colony?

A queen is a gyne, from the Greek for woman, the root of gynaecology. She mates during one brief spell early in life, stores the sperm, and never needs to mate again.

Which members of an ant colony usually die within weeks, soon after mating?

Males exist only to mate and die soon afterwards. A queen that mates with them can live for nearly 30 years, about 100 times longer than a solitary insect of her size.

Which insects do many ants herd, guard and 'milk' for sugary honeydew?

Aphids release drops of honeydew when an ant strokes them with its antennae. In return the ants drive off predators and even carry their herd to fresh plants.

Which members of an ant colony have wings?

Only queens and males grow wings, which carry them on a single mating flight. A queen then sheds hers, and the stubs left behind are one way to tell her from a worker.

What does a fertilised ant egg normally develop into?

A female: every fertilised egg becomes a daughter, whether worker or queen. Males hatch from eggs that were never fertilised, so a male ant has a mother but no father.

Fossils in amber show that ants first appeared during the age of which animals?

Dinosaurs: the first proof was a pair of worker ants sealed in Cretaceous amber, picked up in New Jersey in 1966 by a rock-collecting couple named Frey, whose name the species now carries.

Termites are sometimes called white ants, but they are actually related to which insects?

Cockroaches: DNA studies show that termites are in effect social cockroaches, so their ant-like colonies evolved quite separately from those of real ants.

What does a crushed ant release that sends nearby ants into an attack frenzy?

An alarm pheromone, a scent that also draws in ants from farther away. Some slave-raiding ants turn the trick around, spraying a false alarm that scatters the defenders of the nest they are robbing.

Leafcutter ants carry leaves home in order to do what with them?

Farm fungus: the ants chew the leaves into a mulch that feeds an underground garden, and it is the fungus growing on it, not the leaf, that the colony's young are raised on.

A leafcutter ant can carry roughly how many times its own body weight?

50 times its own weight. The colony's tiniest workers often ride on the leaf being carried, guarding the carrier against flies that try to lay their eggs on it.

The 'zombie-ant' fungus, which takes over an ant's body, inspired the infection in which game and TV series?

The Last of Us imagines the fungus jumping to humans. In real life it drives a dying ant to lock its jaws onto a plant, then grows a stalk from the ant's head to scatter spores.

Which acid, sprayed by many ants in defence, takes its name from the Latin word for ant?

Formic acid comes from formica, the Latin for ant, because early chemists first obtained it by distilling ants. Wood ants still squirt it at anything that threatens the nest.

Army ants rest in a temporary 'bivouac' made of what?

Their own bodies: the workers link legs and cling together into a living nest, which breaks up when the colony marches on and forms again at the next stop.

Army ants cut off from their column can end up marching in which shape until they die of exhaustion?

A circle, known as an ant mill or death spiral, forms because each ant simply follows the one in front. The naturalist William Beebe described one in 1921 so big that a lap took two and a half hours.

Siafu, the name for African driver ants, is a loanword from which language?

Swahili lent English the word siafu. Their marching columns attack whatever lies in the way, snakes, birds and mammals included, and can strip a trapped animal bare.

In parts of Africa and South America, large ants are used in medicine as substitutes for what?

Surgical sutures: the ant is held so that it bites across the cut, pulling the edges together, and its body is then twisted off to leave the locked jaws behind as a stitch.

Which book of the Bible tells the lazy to 'go to the ant' and 'consider her ways'?

Proverbs holds up the ant as a model because she lays in food all summer with no overseer or ruler to make her. The Quran, too, names one of its chapters The Ant.

The red imported fire ant reached the US through Mobile, Alabama, from which region?

South America: the ants came ashore from a cargo ship in the 1930s or 1940s and have since spread right across the southern United States.

Which Surrealist painter used swarming ants as a recurring symbol of death and decay?

Salvador Dalí, who had a well-known fear of insects, set ants crawling over a pocket watch in The Persistence of Memory, his painting of melting clocks.

The Satere-Mawe people of Brazil weave bullet ants into what for warrior initiation rites?

Gloves: the ants are sedated, woven in with their stingers pointing inward and left to wake before a boy slides his hands inside. The Sateré-Mawé call the rite 'sticking the hand into the glove'.

Weaver ants build their nests by binding leaves together using what?

Larval silk: adult weaver ants cannot spin, so a worker grips one of the colony's grubs in its jaws and passes it back and forth across a seam like a tube of glue.

Introduced Argentine ant colonies on separate continents have been shown to form what?

A single global supercolony: ants brought together from California, Europe and Japan treat one another as nestmates instead of fighting, probably because they all descend from one ancestral colony.

What do carpenter ants do with the wood they chew out of timber?

Dump it as sawdust: unlike termites, carpenter ants cannot live on wood and only hollow it out for living space, so little piles of shavings are the giveaway of a nest.

Which ants hang workers from the nest ceiling as living larders?

Honeypot ants: the workers, called repletes, are fed until they swell to many times their normal size. In lean times a hungry nestmate prods a replete and it brings up some of the stored food.

Besides catching prey, trap-jaw ants use their jaw strike to do what?

Fling themselves clear: an ant that fires its jaws against the ground is thrown into the air like a pilot in an ejector seat, and the same strike can bounce an intruder away.

The dracula ant's record-fast jaw strike works on the same principle as which everyday action?

Snapping your fingers: the ant presses its jaw tips together until one slips past the other at up to 90 metres a second, about 200 mph, the fastest animal movement on record when it was filmed in 2018.

Bulldog ants, known for aggressive stings and jumping, are found almost entirely where?

Australia has about 90 species of bulldog ant and almost nowhere else has any. Unlike most ants they see well, and one will turn to watch an intruder and then follow it.

The pharaoh ant is a notorious indoor pest especially in which kind of building?

Hospitals: the two-millimetre ants thrive in heated buildings and are known to carry germs such as Salmonella as they forage, which makes a ward the worst place to have them.

Which ant-eating mammal has a name that means 'earth pig'?

Aardvark is Afrikaans for 'earth pig', after its piglike looks and its burrows. By night it rips open nests with its claws and laps up ants and termites with a sticky tongue up to 30 cm long.

E. O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler's encyclopedic 1990 book on ants won which award in 1991?

The Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction went to The Ants even though it is a vast reference work written mainly for specialists. It was Wilson's second, after On Human Nature.

Ant colony optimisation, a route-finding method in computing, copies which ant behaviour?

Laying scent trails: ants on the shortest path to food get back soonest and mark it again, so the whole colony ends up on the best route. Marco Dorigo turned the idea into an algorithm in the early 1990s.

Which studio made Antz, the 1998 rival to Pixar's A Bug's Life?

DreamWorks Animation made Antz. Its co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg had quit Disney after a falling-out with his boss, and his film beat Disney and Pixar's ant story into cinemas by several weeks.

Scientists glued tiny stilts onto Saharan desert ants to show that they judge the distance home by doing what?

Counting their steps, in effect: ants on stilts marched straight past the nest and ants with shortened legs stopped short, so some inner pedometer must be measuring the trip.

In the usual English telling of Aesop's fable, the ant refuses to feed which idle insect?

The grasshopper sang all summer while the ant stored grain, and is told to dance the winter away. In Aesop's Greek the idler was a cicada, and some translators make it a cricket.

Escamoles, the young of ants served as 'insect caviar', are a delicacy of which country?

Mexico: the brood has been gathered and eaten there since the days of the Aztecs. For all the caviar talk it is not eggs but ant larvae and pupae.

A parasitic worm turns a rainforest ant's rear end bright red, so it resembles what?

A berry: fruit-eating birds are thought to pluck the swollen red rear end and pass the worm's eggs in their droppings, which other ants then carry home and feed to their young.

An ant picks up most smells, including the odour that marks its own colony, with which body part?

Its antennae, which never stop moving: an ant sweeps them over everything in reach to touch, taste and smell it, and they pick up air currents and vibrations as well.

Which thorny trees house colonies of stinging ants inside their hollow thorns in return for protection?

Acacias such as the bullhorn acacia give their ants a home and feed them from the tips of their leaves. The ants repay the tree by attacking browsing animals and cutting back vines that climb it.

The great diversification of ants came with the rise of which of these?

Flowering plants: ants stayed rare for tens of millions of years and only took off in the era when these plants spread and plant-eating insects boomed alongside them.

On Christmas Island, invasive yellow crazy ants have killed millions of which famous migrating animals?

Red crabs: the ants overwhelm them on their famous march to the sea, and with fewer crabs left to eat seedlings, the island's rainforest itself has started to change.

Workers of a Bornean tree ant named in 2018 defend the colony with which suicidal move?

Bursting to spray sticky toxin: a worker ruptures its own abdomen, smearing an enemy in irritant goo and dying on the spot. Scientists duly named the species explodens.

A winged ant differs from a termite in having which feature?

A pinched waist, which anatomists call the petiole, marks an ant, while a termite is broad all the way down. The waist works as a hinge that lets the ant swing its abdomen round to sting or spray.

Florida carpenter ants were found in 2024 to save wounded nestmates with which drastic treatment?

Amputating the injured leg: nestmates gnaw the limb off at its base, but only for a wound high on the thigh, where the operation really does save lives. A wound lower down is simply cleaned.