7 Fun Facts About Ants That Will Amaze You

Ants are a common pest that many people would assume are mundane and uninteresting.

However, there are many fascinating aspects about ants you may never have considered. Let’s look at some amazing facts about ants that will change your mind about them forever.

1. Ants Are Immensely Strong

You’ve probably seen ants often carry large pieces of leaves and other food from your kitchen. Most of the time, a single ant can carry items 50 times their body weight without help from other ants.

2. Larger Population Than Humans

There are far more ants in the world than humans. With approximately 7 billion humans on earth, ants far outnumber humans with around 10 quadrillion ants.

3. Ants Perform Mining

Ants make great miners. In Arizona, they’re renowned for excavating garnet rubies and pushing them to the surface when building their anthills.

4. Long Lifespan

With their size and hazardous and active lifestyle, it may not seem like it, but Queen ants can outlast the rest of their colonies. Sometimes Queen ants can live up to 30 years.

5. They’re Great Team Players

Not only can single ants handle large objects independently, but they all work together meticulously to get the job done. Ants communicate back and forth, so when one ant requires assistance, another comes to help. You’ll often see them travel in lines, communicating along the way. They appear to get along with one another; however, the following fact may shock you.

6. They Keep Slaves

Just when you thought they all got along nicely, ants sometimes enslave other ants. For example, when a group of ants don’t feel like doing a task, they’ll force another kind of ant to perform the job.

7. They Have Robotic Responses

If an ant dies, its body releases a chemical to alert other ants to transport the body to a specific place. However, if the same chemical is sprayed on a live ant, other ants will respond the same way, regardless of how much the live ant tries to break free.

So there you have it, ants behave in ways you may never have noticed.

Perhaps you can identify similar behaviours in humans? Nonetheless, ants are a pretty intelligent species, even if they’re sneaky and irritating to humans.

Zest Pest Control provides Ant Control services throughout Central Scotland for commercial and domestic premises.