A lot of the time we just kill them without even thinking about it. They are small and can be quite a nuisance if they get into our food, but have you ever sat still and just watch them work for a while? They are running up and down the whole time, can carry big pieces of food and they know exactly where to go.
Ants are amazing little animals.
Ants are social insects from the family Formicidae. They evolved from wasp-like ancestors around 110-130 million years ago after the rise of flowering plants.
- What does it mean if we say 'ants are social insects'?
The biologists (people studying plants and animals) believe that there are about 22 000 types of ants, but only 12 500 have been identified. There are so many of them, it takes a while. At any one time there are 10 quadrillion ants on Earth. Whaaaat??? I cannot even count that far...
Depending on the type of ant, they can be very small (less than 1 cm) and some can be bigger than 5 cm, which is quite big for an ant. It will look like a mini monster.
- See if you can find any pictures or information on the biggest and smallest ants found on Earth.
Ants live in colonies and it is divided into different groups with different jobs. It is a lot like the society of humans work - some people work more than others and some are richer than others.
The colonies can be small where you will only find a few hundred ants or it can be huge where its nest covers a lot of ground and there are millions of ants living and working together.
In a colony you can find a queen ant, drone ants and workers or soldier ants, each with its own job. The types and jobs will differ from species to species, but these are the most common ones.
- the queen has one job and that is to lie eggs. She will be protected, because she is the reason why the colony will grow.
- the drones' (or male ant) duty is to mate with the queen
- the workers and the soldiers are female ants that will not reproduce, but they will go out and find food, feed and clean the queen, tend to the babies and defend the nest against intruders.
The worker ant will walk a lot in search of food and it can walk up to 200 m away from the nest. It will be able to find the way back by following the scent left by her and the other ants.
The female queen ant has wings and after she has mated with a male, she will loose her wings and find a place where she will start her own colony. The queen ant can live the longest of all insects. Up to 30 years. The worker ants will live 1 - 3 years, but the males will only live a few weeks.
Ants can bite or sting, bullet ants, have the most painful sting of any insect, its not fatal to humans though like the sting of the Australian jack jumper ant.
- Do research and find information on ants that can harm humans.
Ants are amazing in the way they work and look after one another. We can surely learn a few lessons from them if we just sit and watch them for a while...
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