The only way to get away from ants is to move to Antarctica – get it? It’s really true!  It is the only continent that does not have ants.

Did You Know?

• There are over 12,000 species of ants
• Ants eat more than 60,000 hot dogs thrown away in New York City each year
• In Columbia, ‘hormigas culonas’ is a toasted ant snack
• In a tribe of Brazil, it is against the law to kill an ant
• Crushed ants are used as a pain-relief medicine in India
• ‘Vampire’ ants drink other ant’s blood
• An ant can lift over 20 times the weight of their own body
• The largest colony of ants ever found is in Europe and covers 2,500 miles

Queen of the Colony

Ants live in mazes of underground tunnels called ‘colonies’. The extra large “Queen’ Ant is the founder and leader of the colony.

Only the Queen can lay eggs. And she does – ‘zillions’ of them in her lifetime. The colony is a social network of other ants whose only job is to sustain the Queen. 

Worker ants live a short life of only a few weeks, months, or years. But the Queen can live for over twenty years.

When the Queen Ant dies, the colony dies.

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It’s Off To Work We Go!

Each ant has a certain job.

Male ants cause the Queen Ant to reproduce. Soldier ants protect, fight, and kill invaders of the colony.

Other ‘nanny’ ants take care of the eggs and babies. Some ants gather food. Some ants build the anthills and tunnels. Ant families cooperate in an amazing social network of communication that is one of the wonders of the animal world.

How Many Ants Are There In The World?

Scientists have suggested that there are 100,000,000,000,000,000. That’s 10,000 trillion, or 10 quadrillion. 

There’s over a million ants for every human. 

There are almost 8 billion humans in the world. There are 7.5 million ants in a pound . . .

But counting ants is like counting the stars in the sky – who can ever really know?