INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT ANTS

1. Like all insects, ants have six legs. Each leg has three joints. The legs of the ant are very strong so they can run very quickly. If a man could run as fast for his size as an ant can, he could run as fast as a racehorse. Ants can lift 20 times their own body weight. An ant brain has about 250 000 brain cells. A human brain has 10,000 million so a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human.

2. Ants are normally from 2 to 7 mm long, although carpenter ants can stretch to 2 cm, or almost an inch! Ants can be brown, black or red and can have wings or be wingless. They have narrow waists and elbowed antennae.

3. They are called compound eyes. The abdomen of the ant contains two stomachs. One stomach holds the food for itself and second stomach is for food to be shared with other ants. Like all insects, the outside of their body is covered with a hard armour this is called the exoskeleton. Ants have four distinct growing stages, the egg, larva, pupa and the adult. Biologists classify ants as a special group of wasps. (Hymenoptera Formicidae) There are over 10000 known species of ants. Each ant colony has at least one or more queens.

4. Ant colonies consist of males, females and workers. When a colony begins to grow too large, winged male and female ants leave the colony, mate in flight and then search for a new nesting site, usually in soil, under concrete, or in rotting stumps and wood. Once they find a good site for their new home, they shed their wings and the male soon dies. When the nest has been established, the "queen" lays eggs that hatch into grubs, that pupate into wingless workers. ( Ants go through complete metamorphosis - egg, larva, pupa and adult ) These workers care for the new eggs produced by the queen. Incubation, or hatching of the eggs, lasts from 10 days to several months depending on temperature. Larger ants, called soldiers, are produced for defense and usually have large strong jaws used to protect the colony.

5. The common Black Ants and Wood Ants have no sting, but they can squirt a spray of formic acid. Some birds put ants in their feathers because the ants squirt formic acid which gets rid of the parasites. The Slave-Maker Ant (Polyergus Rufescens) raids the nests of other ants and steals their pupae. When these new ants hatch,they work as slaves within the colony. The worker ants keep the eggs and larvae in different groups according to ages..

6. Ants have colonized almost every landmass on Earth. They can constitute up to 15% of the total animal biomass of a tropical rainforest; in the Amazon the combined weight of the ants is said to be four times larger than that of the tetrapods in the same area. It has also been estimated that the combined weight of all ants exceeds the weight of mankind.


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