Ants

Beneath our feet lies a hidden, highly sophisticated empire run entirely by ants, the planet’s ultimate tiny superpowers.

Common Name	Ant
Scientific Family	Formicidae
Order	Hymenoptera (the same order as bees and wasps)
Known Species	12,000–20,000+ described species, with new ones still being found every year
Diet	Omnivore: nectar, honeydew, seeds, fungi, other insects
Group Name	Colony
Lifespan	Queens: several years, sometimes over a decade; Workers: a few weeks to a few months
Size	2–25 mm (0.08–1 inch)
Distribution	Every continent except Antarctica

An Insect That Barely Acts Like One

Most insects live alone. Ants don’t! A single ant on its own is a fairly ordinary six-legged insect, but zoom out, and an ant colony behaves less like a group of individuals and more like one large, distributed organism. Biologists call this eusociality: overlapping generations, cooperative brood care, and a strict division of labour between castes. It’s the same social system found in bees, termites, and naked mole-rats, and ants are some of its most successful practitioners on the planet.

Anatomy, Briefly!

Like all insects, an ant’s body is divided into three parts: head, thorax, and abdomen (technically the gaster, connected to the thorax by a narrow, pinched waist called the petiole, this waist is actually one of the easiest ways to tell an ant apart from a termite, which has a straight, un-pinched body). Ants have elbowed antennae used for smell, taste, and touch, six legs covered in fine sensory hairs, and because their eyesight is often poor, they rely on chemical and tactile signals far more than sight to navigate their world.

They also don’t breathe or circulate blood the way we do. Oxygen enters through tiny pores called spiracles along the body, and a simple tube-shaped “heart” moves colourless hemolymph from the rear of the body up toward the head. It’s a completely different design brief from any vertebrate and a good reminder of just how differently a body can be built to solve the same problems (moving, sensing, staying alive)!

Colony Life: From One Queen to a Empire

Every colony begins the same way: after a mating flight, a single newly-fertilised queen lands, breaks off her own wings, and digs in alone. Her first batch of workers, tiny, underfed “nanitic” ants, are the only workforce she’ll have until the colony can grow enough to support specialists. From there, a colony typically moves through three broad stages:

• Founding: the queen alone, raising her first workers on stored fat reserves
• Growth: the worker population expands and begins to specialise (foraging, nest-building, brood care, defence)
• Reproduction: once established, the colony starts producing new queens and males for its own mating flights, restarting the cycle elsewhere

Colony size varies enormously by species, from a few dozen ants to, in extreme cases like the red imported fire ant, several million individuals under one queen.

How Ants “Talk”?

Ants don’t have anything like a voice, but they’re far from silent. Their main channel is chemical: pheromone trails laid down by a returning forager guide nestmates straight to a food source, with each additional ant reinforcing the trail, a decentralised, no-manager system for deciding, as a colony, which food sources are worth exploiting. Some research has even found that ants can pick up and follow the pheromone trails of other ant species entirely, effectively eavesdropping on their neighbours’ foraging work.

More surprisingly, a growing number of ant species also communicate by sound, a behaviour called stridulation, produced by rubbing specialised body parts together (usually a ridged “file” on one segment against a “scraper” on the next). It was long assumed some ant groups, including the red wood ants that form iconic mounds across European forests, couldn’t do this at all. Recent research has challenged that: recordings have picked up short, rattling sounds from red wood ants that appear to slow down nearby nestmates when played back to them, a possible, still-debated form of communication in a species that “shouldn’t” have one.

Habitat and Nesting

Ants nest almost everywhere: underground in simple burrows, in built-up mounds that regulate temperature and humidity, inside rotting or moisture-damaged wood, and, for some species, behind the walls, baseboards, and voids of the very houses we live in. A few species, like army ants, skip permanent housing altogether and move as a colony in search of food.

Ants and Other Species: More Than Pests!

Ants sit at the centre of a lot of ecological relationships most people never think about. Many species farm aphids and scale insects for honeydew, a sugar-rich waste product, in exchange for protecting them from predators, a genuine mutualism, and one sensitive enough that even the quality of the honeydew can shift with forest management practices like clear-cutting. Ants are also major seed dispersers and, through constant tunnelling, aerate soil in a way comparable to earthworms.

That balance can break down badly when an ant species ends up somewhere it doesn’t belong. On Christmas Island, accidentally introduced yellow crazy ants formed supercolonies dense enough to spray lethal formic acid across the forest floor, wiping out tens of millions of the island’s endemic red crabs and, with them, the crabs’ role in recycling leaf litter through the whole ecosystem. Authorities are now trialling a biocontrol approach: releasing a tiny, host-specific wasp that targets the scale insects the crazy ants depend on for honeydew, to bring the invasive supercolonies back under control without broad-scale pesticide use.

When Ants Get Sick

Colonies face their own disease pressures, including one of the more genuinely strange phenomena in the insect world. The fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects foraging carpenter ants in tropical forests and, over the following days, hijacks their behaviour: the infected ant leaves the colony, descends to a specific height and humidity band, and clamps its jaws onto the underside of a leaf in a “death grip” before dying. Days later, a fungal fruiting body erupts from the ant’s head to release spores onto the forest floor below, ready to infect the next unlucky forager.

For a long time, this was assumed to be a brain infection. More recent research found the opposite: fungal cells surround the ant’s muscle fibres but leave the brain itself untouched, suggesting the fungus controls its host’s body directly at the muscular level rather than by rewiring its mind, more like a puppeteer pulling strings than a hijacked pilot. Colonies aren’t defenceless against it, either: mutual grooming helps limit its spread, and researchers have even found a second, “hyper parasitic” fungus that infects the zombie fungus itself, capping outbreaks before they can wipe out a colony.

When Ants Meet Our Animals

For most pets and livestock, an ant encounter is a non-event. Fire ants (genus Solenopsis) are the exception worth knowing about. If a mound is disturbed, workers can deliver repeated stings in quick succession, injecting a venom built around alkaloid compounds called solenopsins. In dogs, this typically shows up as a raised, red, itchy bump that resolves within a day, occasionally with small yellowish pustules, rather than the pus-filled blister more commonly seen in human reactions. Severe, whole-body allergic reactions are rare in companion animals, though animals unable to move away from a disturbed mound can end up with dozens of stings at once, which is where things get more serious.

Fascinating Facts

• Ants are estimated to outnumber humans by around 2.5 million to one, roughly 20 quadrillion ants alive at any given time.
• An ant can lift roughly 50 times its own body weight, proportionally, several times what an equivalently-scaled human could manage.
• Leafcutter ants don’t eat leaves directly, they farm a fungus on the leaf pulp they collect, and eat the fungus instead.
• The word for a group of ants is, appropriately, a colony or sometimes an army.

What People Get Wrong About Ants

“If I kill the ants I see, the problem’s solved.”
Not really. At any given time, only a small fraction of a colony is out foraging, the rest, including the queen(s), stay hidden in the nest. Killing visible workers barely dents the colony; the only way to actually eliminate one is to treat the nest itself and kill the queen(s). :((

“Flying ants are a different, more dangerous kind of ant.”
They’re not a separate species, they’re the winged reproductive caste (new queens and males) of an ordinary colony, released all at once during a mating flight. Seeing a swarm indoors is worth paying attention to (it can mean there’s a nest nearby), but the ants themselves aren’t inherently more dangerous than their wingless nestmates.

“The queen is in charge, she directs the colony.”
Her only job is reproduction. There’s no ant giving orders. Decisions like which food source to exploit emerge from thousands of workers independently laying and following pheromone trails, a decentralised system with no manager, which is a big part of why biologists describe colonies as “superorganisms” rather than simple groups.

“All ants bite or sting painfully.”
Most ants people encounter day to day are harmless nuisance insects. Serious venom and repeated stinging is really the specialty of one group, fire ants (Solenopsis), not an ant-wide trait.

“If ants were human-sized, they could lift a car.”
This one gets repeated constantly, but it skips over basic physics. As an animal scales up, its body mass increases faster than the strength of its muscles and exoskeleton (the square-cube law), so a human-sized ant wouldn’t keep its tiny-scale strength-to-weight ratio. Ants really are proportionally very strong at ant size; that doesn’t scale up the way the meme suggests.

References:

• https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/facts/ants
• https://www.msdvetmanual.com/toxicology/bites-and-stings-from-spiders-scorpions-and-insects/wasp-bee-and-ant-stings-to-animals#Fire-Ants_v3357552
• https://christmasislandnationalpark.gov.au/discover/nature/conservation/yellow-crazy-ant-biocontrol/
• Johansson, T., & Gibb, H. (2012). Forestry alters foraging efficiency and crop contents of aphid-tending red wood ants, Formica aquilonia. PloS one, 7(3), e32817. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0032817
• Chalissery, J. M., Renyard, A., Gries, R., Hoefele, D., Alamsetti, S. K., & Gries, G. (2019). Ants Sense, and Follow, Trail Pheromones of Ant Community Members. Insects, 10(11), 383. https://doi.org/10.3390/insects10110383
• Barbier, G. L. R., Rollo, M., Hall, S., & Klaminder, J. (2025). Stridulation-like behaviour in the Red Wood ant (Formica rufa). Bioacoustics, 34(4), 468–480. https://doi.org/10.1080/09524622.2025.2500391

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