- Don't kill the bugs, let them live!
Do you know these amazing ant facts or are they new to you? Do you know what a “group” of ants is called?
- There are vampire ants that live in Madagascar. They eat by biting holes into their larvae and drinking their blood.
- Ants have already survived the ice age and it seems the smaller the better as they are clearly more resilient than dinosaurs.
- Ants are enslavers and will take ants from other colonies and force them to work.
- They forage for food by following other ants trails of pheromones to detect food sources.
- Male ants have wings and will fly in swarms to find mates.
- The world’s smallest ant is the Pharoah ant, which is almost microscopic at just 2mm long.
- Some Native American tribes practice initiation rituals in which they force young men to be bitten again and again by bullet ants.
- The world’s biggest ant is the bullet ant. They’re found in the Panama jungle and can grow up to 1.6 inches.
- Ants can be at war with rival colonies for weeks at a time.
- Each ant colony has its own special scent and because of this, they can smell intruders. Did you know this as one of the the amazing ant facts?
- Ants navigate by using the earth’s magnetic field.
- There are over 10,000,000,000,000,000 ants on the Earth.
- Ants are a tidy species and worker ants are known to take garbage outside of the nest to an ant dump.
- They help carry other insects from plant to plant, not only to be helpful but mostly because they want the insects’ nectar.
- Ants are a part of the Hymenoptera insect groups including wasps and bees.
- Birds love black ants and use them in their feathers. The ants secrete formic acid which gets rid of parasites.
- The Australian jumping spider disguises itself as a green ant and sneaks into the nest in order to feed on the larvae in a process called chemical mimicry.
- If there was an ant the size of a human, it could run as fast as a race horse.
- Ants don’t have lungs but instead tiny holes that oxygen enters and carbon dioxide leaves.
- Ants move approximately 50 tons of soil per square mile every single year.
- Female worker ants are known to travel as far as 200 metres from their nests.
- Ant blood is colorless.
- After an ant dies, it releases a chemical that communicates its death so other ants will move it to a burial ground.
- The ratio of ants to humans on Earth is 1,000,000,000 to 1.
- Soldier ants ‘steal’ eggs from other colonies and when they hatch, they treat them as ant slaves.
- Some ant nests are as deep as two feet underground.
- Leafcutter ants are farmers that grow mushrooms through secreting antibiotics, enhancing mold growth.
- The world’s largest ant colony spans across 600 miles, found in Southern California. Have you ever heard this as one of the amazing ant facts?
- Australian green ant colonies can have nests over 12 trees.
- There are 12,000 species of ants on Earth.
- There is a species of ant named after Harrison Ford, whose also an environmentalist, called ‘Pheidole harrisonfordi’.
- The evolution of the ant is all thanks to flowering plants that provide more complex ground habitat, happening over100 million years ago.
- There are three types of ants in a colony; the queen, the major worker and the lesser worker. The queen is the largest of the ants with the lesser worker being the smallest.
- The bite of a bullet ant is said to be as painful as actually being shot, hence the name it seems? Yike.
- A group of ants is called a swarm.
Now that you know what a group of ants is called, what else did you learn from these amazing ant facts? Let me know you’re favorite facts in the comments!