50 Fun Facts About Ants

Ants belong to the family Formicidae within which insect order?

That puts them alongside wasps and bees. Ants evolved from vespoid wasp ancestors during the Cretaceous period.

Roughly how many ant species have been described, out of an estimated 22,000?

Ants are identified by their elbowed antennae and the node-like waist formed by a constricted abdominal segment.

Which continent has no indigenous ants at all?

Only a few remote islands such as Greenland, Iceland and Hawaii also lack native ants. In tropical forests ants may outweigh all wild birds and mammals combined.

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

The archaic English word emmet shares the same root. The family name Formicidae comes from the Latin formica.

The scientific study of ants is called what?

The word comes from the Greek myrmex. It was coined by William Morton Wheeler, who also described honeypot ants in 1908.

Which ants are the only members of a colony that lay eggs?

Gyne is the formal term for a queen. Over a lifetime one can lay thousands or even millions of eggs; some reproduce without mating.

Ant queens can live for up to how long?

Workers last one to three years and males only a few weeks. Queens live about 100 times longer than solitary insects of similar size.

Hermann Appel kept a Lasius niger queen alive in captivity for nearly how long?

A Pogonomyrmex owyheei queen in the field has an estimated maximum lifespan of thirty years.

Which members of an ant colony have wings?

Queens shed theirs after the nuptial flight, leaving visible stubs. The six legs end in hooked claws for climbing.

A fertilised ant egg develops into which kind of offspring?

Unfertilised eggs become haploid males. Ants then go through complete metamorphosis, with a pupal stage before adulthood.

Ants range in body length from 0.75 millimetres up to about how long?

The biggest ever was the fossil Titanomyrma giganteum, whose queen was 6 cm long with a 15 cm wingspan.

In 1966 E. O. Wilson's team identified an ant fossil in amber dating back roughly how far?

The Cretaceous ant, Sphecomyrma, had some wasp-like features not found in modern ants. The oldest ant fossils are around 113 to 100 million years old.

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

Together they form the order Blattodea. Like ants they are eusocial with sterile workers, but they do not undergo complete metamorphosis.

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

Some species even deploy propaganda pheromones to confuse enemy ants and make them fight each other.

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

Next to humans, they form some of the largest and most complex animal societies on Earth, with nests holding millions of individuals.

A leafcutter ant can carry up to how many multiples of its own body weight?

They are native to South and Central America, Mexico and the southern United States, and belong to the genera Atta, Acromyrmex and Amoimyrmex.

The central mound of a leafcutter nest can grow to more than how wide in a few years?

Smaller radiating mounds extend out to a radius of 80 metres, and the whole complex can house 3.55 million ants.

In ant-fungus farming, the nutrient-rich swollen tips the fungus grows for ants are called what?

The growths are rich in lipids and carbohydrates. Farming of this kind is thought to have evolved in ants only twice.

Unlike most ants, army ants are notable for not building what?

A colony moves almost constantly, forming temporary bivouacs. The behaviour evolved independently in several lineages, a case of convergent evolution.

Army ant workers are usually blind or have compound eyes reduced to what?

Soldiers are larger with bigger mandibles and carry the heaviest prey back to the bivouac. Winged males can resemble wasps.

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

The genus Dorylus forms temporary underground bivouacs that it may occupy for a few days or up to three months.

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

The ant grips the wound edges in its mandibles and locks in place; the body is then cut off, leaving the head as a clamp.

Fire ants belong to which genus of stinging ants?

The genus holds over 200 species. Many red ants that get the name are not in it at all, including Myrmica rubra.

The red imported fire ant first reached the United States through which seaport?

It arrived by cargo ship between 1933 and 1945 with an estimated 9 to 20 unrelated queens, and was first observed in 1942.

The bullet ant's Venezuelan nickname, hormiga veinticuatro, refers to what?

Paraponera clavata lives in humid lowland rainforests of Central and South America and is named for a sting that feels like being shot.

On Justin Schmidt's sting pain index, the bullet ant ranks how?

Schmidt likened it to walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail in your heel. It scores 4.0 plus on his scale.

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

About 80 sedated ants are woven in with stingers facing inward. When they wake, the initiate must endure the stings.

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

Workers hold larvae like glue guns. Colonies can span a hundred nests across many trees with more than half a million workers.

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

Native to the Parana River lowlands, the species has spread to Mediterranean climates worldwide, from South Africa to Japan to California.

Carpenter ants chew galleries in timber, but unlike termites they do not do what?

They discard sawdust-like debris outside the nest. Camponotus is the most species-rich ant genus, with over 1,500 described species.

Honeypot ants have specialised workers whose abdomens swell with food, known as what?

They serve as living larders, and other ants feed from them by trophallaxis. Henry C. McCook first documented them in 1881.

Trap-jaw ants of the genus Odontomachus can open their mandibles to what angle?

Sensory hairs trigger the snap, with peak speeds of 126 to 230 km/h and closure in about 130 microseconds.

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

Mystrium camillae holds the record, leaving Odontomachus in second place despite jaws that close in 130 microseconds.

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

The genus Myrmecia holds at least 93 species there, with a single species known from New Caledonia. Fabricius established the genus in 1804.

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

The tiny yellowish ant has many queens per colony, so it can split into bud colonies quickly. Its name may come from the plagues of Egypt.

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

It was Wilson's second Pulitzer for General Nonfiction, after On Human Nature in 1979. The book was simply titled The Ants.

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

It was Wilson's second Pulitzer for General Nonfiction, after On Human Nature in 1979. The book was simply titled The Ants.

Ant colony optimisation algorithms were first proposed in 1992 in whose PhD thesis?

The first algorithm searched for an optimal path in a graph, inspired by how ants lay and follow pheromone trails to food.

The 1998 animated film Antz was produced by which studio?

Woody Allen and Sharon Stone led the voice cast. It grossed 171.8 million dollars and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The film Antz grew out of a 1988 Disney pitch with what working title?

That pitch featured a pacifist worker ant teaching his militaristic colony to think independently, years before Jeffrey Katzenberg left for DreamWorks.

In Aesop's fable, the industrious ant is contrasted with which idle insect?

Ants stand for diligence in many traditions. In the Quran, Sulayman hears an ant warn its fellows to flee his marching army.

Escamoles, a Mexican delicacy sometimes called insect caviar, are made from what?

They come from two ant species and could fetch 50 to 200 US dollars per kilogram in 2006 because they are seasonal and hard to find.

A parasitic nematode makes the black rear ends of certain canopy ants turn what colour?

Birds mistake the infected ants for ripe fruit, eat them, and spread the parasite. The ants even start carrying their gasters high.

Ants leave trails that other ants follow using which sense?

A forager that finds food marks the route home. Ants also communicate by sound and touch.

Sterile, wingless female ants that do most of a colony's work are formally called what?

Soldiers are dinergates. Colonies are often described as superorganisms because the ants act as a unified entity.

Ants became the dominant insects after an adaptive radiation at the start of which period?

In the Cretaceous they were rare, making up only about 1 percent of insect fossils from the era.

The critically endangered Sri Lankan relict ant is an example of ants threatened by what?

Most ants shrug off human eradication attempts, but specialised island species can be displaced by invaders.

Which of these is an invasive ant species listed alongside the red imported fire ant?

Better known as the Argentine ant, it causes substantial harm to native arthropods, vertebrates and plants where it has been introduced.

The strongly constricted segment that forms an ant's node-like waist is called the what?

Along with elbowed antennae and metapleural glands, it sets ants apart from other insects. The body divides into head, mesosoma and metasoma.

Which ant genus, whose name means near-Ponera, contains the bullet ant?

The species name clavata means club-shaped. In Brazil locals call it formigao-preto, the big black ant.