40 Surprising Facts About Ants

Ants are members of the Hymenoptera insect order, which also includes bees, wasps, and sawflies. They are members of the insect family Formicidae, which means “ant family.” On the continent of North America alone, there are over 60 genres with hundreds of different species. Ants come in various shapes and sizes, and they can be found all over the world.The fire ant, carpainter ants,Pavement ants and Odorous ants are one of the most well-known types of ant.

1. There are over ten quadrillion ants in the world that weigh about the same as all human beings on Earth.
2. Harvard University has the most extensive collection of ants on the globe.
3. Ants live in highly organized colonies. It is believed that the largest ant colony in the world was a supercolony of red wood ants found in Hokkaido, Japan. This colony has 45,000 nests that are all interconnected by a series of tunnels, creating an ant city that covers around 670 acres of land.
4. There are more than 10,000 ant species on the globe.
5. Ants can survive in a running microwave as they are small enough to dodge the rays.
6. Ants are believed to be living on Earth from the time of dinosaurs that is about 110 to 130 million years.
7. The largest ant species ever found was discovered in fossilized remains(about 49.5 million years old) in Wyoming, United States. The insect was named as Titanomyrma lubei for its incredible length, was over 2 inches long, and comparable in size to a modern hummingbird.
8. The dracula ant has the quickest bite in the world: its jaws closes 5,000 times faster than a blink of a human eye and counts at 200 miles /hr. The jaw of these ants goes from 0 to 200 miles per hour in 0.000015 seconds.
9. In ancient times, Indian doctors used live ants to ‘stitch’ cut wounds together. The doctor would hold the edges together and get the ant to bite through the skin. The ant’s head would then be snapped off, leaving its jaws as the ‘stitch’!
10. There are soldier ants that serve the Queen and also act as a security guard on the entrances of ant nest by using their heads to block the way of intruders.
11. Two days after an ant die. The other ants pick up the deceased ant and carry it to an ant graveyard.
12. Lemon ants taste like real lemon.
13. There are over 1.6 million people in Manhattan and 1.2 billion ants
14. Ants don’t hear from ears; instead, they detect the vibrations from their feet.
15. When ants fight, they fight to death.
16. Ant colonies can sustain for a long time. The queens can live long, up to 30 years, and worker ants live from 1 to 3 years. Males, however, are more transitory, being relatively short-lived and surviving for only a few weeks. Ant queens are estimated to live 100 times as long as solitary insects of a similar size.
17. Ants are considered as the longest living insects on Earth.
18. Ants are found in every continent of the world except Iceland, Antarctica, Greenland, and some islands.
19. Ants can have millions of babies. Once mated, the ant queen never mates again. Instead of mating again, she stores the male’s sperm in a special kind of pouch until she opens the pouch and allows sperm to fertilize the eggs she produces.
20. After mating, queen ants and male ants lose their wings.
21. When the army ant queen dies, colonies quickly disappear. While some ants are being attacked by other colonies, the other luckier ones (usually the workers) are being accepted in other colonies.
22. When the army ant queen dies, colonies quickly disappear. While some ants are being attacked by other colonies, the other luckier ones (usually the workers) are being accepted in other colonies.
23. The common Wood Ants and Black Ants have no sting, but they can squirt a spray of formic acid.
24. Worker ants are responsible for taking the rubbish from the nest and putting it into a rubbish dump.
25. Army ants usually have a brown color, though some army ants are also black.
26. Queen ants are provided with wings at birth; they lose these wings after flying off to start new colonies.
27. Worker ants may live 7 years, and the Queen may live as long as 15 years.
28. Spiders are scared of ants due to the formic acid they contain.
29. For every human in the world, there are 1.6 million ants.
30. The biggest predators of ants are woodpeckers that can eat as many as 2,000 ants per day, and anteaters that can eat up to 30000 ants a day.
31. Army ants are usually antagonistic to each other, attacking soldiers from rival colonies in border disputes that keep the army ant colonies separate from each other.
32. There are more than 12,000 species of ants all over the world, which consist of mostly brown-red or black, and some are metallic too.
33. Bullet ants are believed to have the most painful bite in the world. As their name suggests, the bite is equivalent to the hit of a bullet.
34. Like most insects, ants have compound eyes. This means their eyes have multiple lenses, but in general, most species of ants do not have particularly great eyes for seeing very far.
35. Ants are considered as most brainy insects in the world as they have about 250000 brain cells. A human brain has 10,000 million, so this way, a colony of 40,000 ants collectively has the same size as that of a human brain.
36. Ants communicate with each other using pheromones, sounds, and touch. The use of pheromones as chemical signals is more developed in ants, such as the red harvester ant, than in other hymenopteran groups.
37. Ants are so small to possess a complex respiratory system as humans. So instead, they have tiny holes for breathing in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide.
38. Some species of ants can swim. They have the ability to survive in water by using their own style of doggy paddle, and they can float in water for long periods.
39. Foraging ants travel distances of up to 200 meters (700 ft) from their nest, and scent trails allow them to find their way back even in the dark.
40. The Bulldog Ant is the most dangerous ant in the world. This ant lives on the coasts of Australia. Bulldog ants are extremely aggressive ants that use their sting and jaw at the same time. When it bites, it injects toxic venom, which is known to kill an adult human in barely 15 minutes.