Care Info: Ants

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Receiving Your Ants

• After receiving the habitat in the mail, order your ants by mailing or faxing the coupon to the address/fax number on the coupon.

Prepare Your Space-age Ant Habitat

• Remove tape covering air holes. Remove the small poker taped to the bottom of the habitat. Remove the lid and use the poker to make four holes in the gel, two about a half an inch and two about an inch deep. These will encourage your ants to start tunneling.
• When ants arrive, pour them into habitat and close the lid. Work quickly—ants are fast! If ants seem very active in the vial, slow them down by putting them in the refrigerator for fifteen minutes before transferring them to the habitat. (Do not put them in the freezer.)
• Ants like shade; keep the habitat out of direct sunlight.
• Ants may take up to two days to start tunneling.
• Because ants are tiny, they don’t need a lot of oxygen. Opening the lid for a few seconds every day or two gives them a burst of fresh air and livens them up.
• Don’t put water or food in the habitat. The blue gel contains all the food and water ants need, plus protection against mold and bacteria.

Space-age Ant Habitat

Your ant house is based on an ant habitat developed for space travel. Scientists wanted to study ants in near-weightless conditions. Scientists developed the gel as an alternative to sand. It does not crush ants during takeoff and landing, and it provides all the food and water they need.

Ant Science

Observe
How many ants are in the habitat?
Where are they?
What words describe them? What color are they?
What do you see on their legs?
What is on their heads?
How many legs, antennae, eyes do they have?
What are the ants doing?
Why do you think they’re doing that?

Describe
How many tunnels do you see?
How long are the tunnels?
Are the tunnels connected? Are they straight
or curved? Do they turn corners?
Where are the ants?
How many ants are in the tunnels?
How many are on top?

Record
Draw a picture of an ant.
Draw where they are in the tunnels.
Label the parts of the ant.
Write facts about ants on another piece of paper.
Explain out loud or in writing what the ants are doing in their space-age house.
Draw and color a picture of the ant house; staple it on top of all the ant pages to make an “Ant Science Report.”

Simple Science: Ants

Ready to learn more about ants? Get your students reading, observing, counting, writing and drawing with these free downloads.

Fun Stuff: Ants

Here are some activities just for fun. Get silly, get creative and do a little word searching when you download these free activities for your classroom.