Types Of Ants
Cool Facts about the Types of Ants
There are more than 12,000 identified types of ants in the world, depending on how you count them. Scientists estimate there are around 22,000 types of ants in the world, if you include the ones they have completed cataloguing. Ants probably first appeared during the Cretaceous period at about the same time that plants started to display flowers. That’s about 120 million years ago.
Trying to say anything meaningful about so many different species is always difficult, so instead I will just try to give you a sense of ant diversity by looking at a few interesting aspects of ant life and society.
Ant Society
Most all ant societies have a tri-partite structure with a central Queen ant (usually larger than the other ants), a class of soldier ants, and then a class of worker ants. However, within this overall structure, there can be quite a bit of diversity with worker ants divided according to very specific jobs like “foraging” and “building” and soldier ants divided into fighters and defenders. Because of this division of labor and high complexity involved in ant society, scientists have become intensely involved in studying ant society and trying to understand the nature and method of this complexity. E.O. Wilson, the famous writer and scientist, began his research with ants, which allowed him to think about human society through an original and fruitful prism. (You may recall that the American Transcendalist writer, Henry David Thoreau also includes a section of his famous Walden Pond that discusses the fascination invoked by the complexities of the ant world.)
Therefore, here are some curious facts that you may find interesting.
Ant Busses
Did you know that some ants have a system of public transportation? In certain ant societies, there is an extreme size difference between the smallest workers and the largest. In order to conserve energy for work, the smaller workers climb onto the back of the larger worker (the “bus” ant) and sit comfortably while the large ant transports them to the job site. Once there, the smaller ants unload, do their jobs and return to the “bus” ant who then transports them back to the anthill.
This is only the beginning, however. Many types of ants that live in trees can glide. Others that live in water areas can swim and live in underwater nests. Still others can chain their bodies together and form bridges to ford streams and pass other barriers. Some can even jump.
Ant Trails
Have you ever wondered why ants are always going along the same “trail,” as if they can’t think of another way of going? Ants do this because instead of seeing they are smelling. They use pheromones to mark a trail as they return from foraging and then other ants follow that trail on the way back. When they’re done, the trail slowly disappears as the pheromone wears off.
Chemical Warfare
Pheromones also have a peculiar place in ant defenses. When an ant is destroyed, for example, it releases pheromones alerting other ants to imminent peril. That is why when you sometimes crush an ant it will make the other ant followers go crazy running all over the place. In some ant societies, a crushed ant will act like a call for back up. Soon the soldier ants will arrive and go on the attack.
Ants even use counter-intelligence measures to fight other types of ants. Some types of ants are double agents, infiltrating the ranks of a rival group and spreading a scent that makes ants in that group attack one another as if they were rival groups.
In fact, the more that you study these tiny creatures and their complicated social patterns the harder it is to just see them as a nuisance to be done away with at the first opportunity.