By Laura Anderson
Ants - everyone has heard of them! Inhabiting nearly every country in the world, it’s difficult to live your life without ever seeing at least one. Earth is home to more than 12,000 different ant species, with 51 of them living right here in the UK. To most, ants are nothing more than a mere insect, but there’s more to these creepy crawlies than what meets the eye.
The Black Garden Ant, Lasius niger, native to the UK.
Ants belong to the order, Hymenoptera, which also encompasses wasps and bees. They are eusocial insects, meaning they have a high level of social organisation in which certain individuals produce offspring and non-reproductive individuals care for the young. All ants live in colonies, there are no known solitary species on Earth. A colony is composed of one or more egg-laying queens, workers and soldiers.
An ant colony can be as small as a few dozen ants, but can reach well over a couple thousand. The largest known ant colony is the Argentine Ant Supercolony, covering at least 6000 km across Portugal, Spain, France and Italy. This supercolony was home to 307 million ants and consisted of 45,000 nests all interconnected by underground passages.
It’s not just their colonies that are amazing. Ants have been shown to work together as if they were a single animal. These insects have been recorded building bridges and rafts - some have even begun farming! Leafcutter ants, Atta cephalotes, collect leaves as fertiliser for their own crop: fungus! But they’re not the only ones, over 240 species of ants have learned how to farm fungus. Furthermore, several other ant species have been seen farming aphids (a smaller insect which feeds on sap).
An ant farming aphids.
But how have they achieved this level of social organisation? Ants don’t have ears, some don’t even have eyes, yet these insects are capable of achieving what humans have and so much more. Whilst some have proposed the idea of a hivemind (a situation in which the ants’ minds are interconnected to a single source), there is no evidence of this being the case. Instead, many have put forward the idea of swarm intelligence.
Ants communicate with pheromones, a type of chemical which when excreted or secreted can trigger a social response in members of the same species. Studies suggest that ants may leave pheromone trails which allow the colony to return to certain food sources. Hence the term of a “scout ant”, one who seeks out a food source and later brings all his friends to enjoy the meal! Further research indicates that ants may have a communication centre located in their brains, similar to that of humans, which elicits a panic response when danger is nearby.
Ants are an intriguing type of insect, and it begs the question, what else can these creepy crawlies achieve?
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