You may have seen last week’s headlines about ants saving each other’s lives by providing voluntary, complex, and strategic medical care (discussed below!). The bottom line?
Ants are absolutely astonishing animals.
Aaaaand . . . before we get any more tangled up in alliteration, here’s what we think everyone needs to know about ants:
- They are insects, who evolved between 140 and 168 million years ago, are most closely related to bees and wasps, comprise over 12,000 known species, and can be found throughout the world.
- They range in size from 0.08 to 1 inch and are most often yellow, brown, red, or black in color.
- They are “enthusiastically social” and live in “structured”, “tightly knit and efficient” “family communities”. (In fact, along with that of honeybees, their “social behavior” is considered “the most complex in the insect world”.)
- Each ant is an “integral” part of their community; and, together, they are “essential members of the[ir] ecosystems”, with some species identified as “keystone species that have a disproportionately large effect on their ecological communities”.
- They “communicate and cooperate” with each other, primarily using scent and touch (“[i]magine if we had noses on our fingertips”), and they “pass useful knowledge between generations”.
- Adults “continuous[ly] care” for their community’s young.
- They save each others’ lives by providing medical care: “‘ants are able to diagnose a wound, see if it’s infected or sterile, and treat it accordingly over long periods of time by other individuals – the only medical system that can rival that would be the human one,’….”
- They can carry up to “50 times their own body weight”.
- They divide community responsibilities between three groups: (1) the queen(s), who found(s) and populate(s) the colony; (2) the workers, who are all female and undertake all of the “essential work” (e.g., building the nest, feeding and tending the brood, defending the nest, foraging, policing conflicts, disposing of waste); and (3) the males, who are called “drones”, “play no part in everyday nest activities”, and are typically tasked only with reproduction (after which they die).
- Those who have vision can see ultraviolet light.
- They are very similar to humans; for example, both ants and humans “divide labor and form complex social networks. Both work in groups to accomplish tasks . . . that no individual could complete alone. Both raise children in families. Both use the same class of neurotransmitters.” (In 1871, Charles Darwin even wrote: “‘The brain of an ant is one of the most marvelous atoms in the world,’ . . . ‘perhaps more so than the brain of man.’”)