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Ant Fun Facts

•  Harvester ant colonies can have as many as 40-50 thousand ants. Such a colony would collectively have about the same number of brain cells as a human being!

•  Ants ‘talk’ using scent, sound, touch and sight. You see them ‘talking’ when they touch antennae.

•  Ants have group meetings and exhibit great teamwork.

•  All the ants you see are female. Males are created only for reproductive purposes, and they die shortly after mating.

•  Ant colonies work 24/7. Some ants sleep, while others are active.

•  Ant science is called Myrmecology, and the scientists are called myrmecologists (mer-muh-KAHL-uh-jists).

•  Some ant predators are spiders, wasps, ant lions, birds and anteaters. Some people also find ants a handy source of protein.

•  Ants can carry up to 50 times their own weight. If people could do that, a hundred pound person would lift two-and-a-half tons!

•  Ants are one of Earth’s oldest creatures. Fossils over 100 million years old have been found. This means ants were walking the Earth 35 million years before the dinosaurs!

•  Ants have changed very little in that time. Like the shark and crocodile, they were so well-adapted that they couldn’t get much better!

•  Ants have a second stomach called a ‘crop.’ They use this stomach to store food for other members of the colony.

•  Ants outnumber humans by almost 200,000 to one. It’s a good thing we’re bigger!

•  Ants secrete scent molecules called pheromones. This allows them to leave a track that other ants can follow to find food.

•  Both male and princess ants have wings. They mate while flying. Then the princess loses her wings and becomes a queen, and the male dies. The queen creates more males about once a year only for mating.