- Like that ants can carry 50 times their own body weight?
These fun facts about ants probably aren’t ones that you know. Like do you know how long a queen ant lives for and what happens after she dies?
- If there’s a fertilized egg, a female ant develops however if the egg is not fertilized, a male ant hatches.
- Army ants always on the move and are found in Central and South America, never a part of an ant nest.
- A bulldog ant bite can kill a human in 15 minutes.
- The sole purpose of a male ant is to mate and once it has, it dies.
- A prehistoric ant was found with a wing span of six inches., called the Titanomymra giganteum. It’s the biggest ant to have ever existed.
- An Australian green ant butt has a similar taste to lime. Would you try it?
- Ant eggs are a delicacy in Mexico. The dish, ‘escamoles’, is a delicacy. Is this one of the best fun facts about ants?
- The Australian bulldog ant is the world’s most dangerous ant and has caused three deaths since the 1930s.
- Ants can swim.
- Ants are the only non-mammals who can learn via interaction and teach each other things.
- They have a larger muscle to body ratio than humans.
- Honeypot ants are living honeypots and these ants spend their days feasting on food, making their bellies swell into bags of sweet liquid. They then puke up their food to feed others in the colony.
- A larvae becomes a queen if it is well nourished and its parent is of a sexually reproductive colony.
- 20% of ants in a colony do absolutely nothing.
- Ants are the world’s smartest insects and have a shocking 250,000 brain cells.
- An ant that is destined to become a queen ant is called a Princess ant.
- When a queen ant has mated, her wings fall off.
- In Arizona, ants find garnets and drag them to the surface like miners.
- Ants have compound eyes and can see movement very
well. - Fire ant colonies in the Amazon Rainforest link their legs together to create a ‘raft’ so they can float down rivers to travel through the forest.
- The carpenter ant can self destruct to save other ants by contracting its body and forcing it to rupture their gland and spraying toxic liquids at its enemies.
- Ant eggs survive by consuming the queen ant’s saliva.
- A swarm of army ants can be as long as 100m.
- There is 1,000 species of ants that live in the United States. Did you know this as one of the fun facts about ants?
- The bullet ant has the most painful sting of any insect with the effect of it’s venom-filled sting lasting up to 24 hours. (And has been compared to putting your finger in a 240 volt socket.)
- Ants are sheepdogs among insects, herding aphids and protecting them from predators.
- Ants smell with their antennae.
- The queens job is to lay tens of thousands of eggs and ensure that the colony remains strong and mighty.
- Termites aren’t ants and are actually more similar to cockroaches than ants.
- Ants can survive a whole day underwater because they don’t have lungs.
- When the queen dies, the rest of the colony will die within a few months.
- East African Indigenous tribes use ants in medicine and will have them bite each side of a cut to help it heal as the power of an ants jaw seals the skin.
- The soldier ant is just that, a soldier for the Queen. These use their heads to block entrances and stop intruder from entering the nest.
- Ants can carry 50 times their own body weight. What a stunning thing to learn and the best of the fun facts about ants.
- In tropical regions, ants make up 25% of the mass of all fauna.
- Queen ants can live three decades, longer than any other
insect. - Worker ants will move the larvae further into the nest on colder days.
What did you think of these fun facts about ants? Let me know what you think in the comments!