Facts About Ants

Many ants can carry many times their own body weight; leafcutter ants, among the strongest, can lift roughly 50 times their weight, comparable to a human hauling a car.

Ants communicate mainly through pheromones, chemical signals they use to mark trails, sound alarms, and point nestmates toward food.

Scientists have formally described more than 13,800 ant species worldwide, with researchers estimating thousands more remain undiscovered.

Ants have a "social stomach," or crop, used to store liquid food they later share with nestmates through mouth-to-mouth feeding called trophallaxis, in addition to their own digestive stomach.

Queen ants are unusually long-lived for insects; some queens, particularly in lab studies, have lived close to 30 years, while worker ants typically survive only a few months to a few years.

Ants act as ecosystem engineers, aerating and turning over soil as they dig tunnels and helping control populations of other insects.

Some ant species "farm" aphids, protecting them from predators in exchange for honeydew, a sugary substance the aphids secrete.

Fire ants survive floods by linking their bodies together into a waterproof, floating raft that can keep the colony alive on the surface of the water for days or even weeks.

Ants have no lungs; they breathe through a series of tiny openings on their exoskeleton called spiracles.

Rival ant colonies sometimes fight prolonged territorial battles, with documented conflicts between colonies lasting for days or weeks.

Ants evolved from wasp-like ancestors more than 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, making them older than most modern mammal groups.

Leafcutter ants don't eat the leaves they harvest; they use the leaf fragments to cultivate a fungus underground, which becomes their actual food source.