Ant Facts

• Ants are team players. It’s all about what is best for the colony, not about promoting oneself. People can learn a lot from the ants.
• There are anywhere from 12,000 to 22,000 different species of ants!
• Some ants can carry 100 times their weight!
• If you are an ant, you use math to count your steps! You count how many steps you have taken from home in search of food, and then on your return journey you know how far you have to travel back!
• There is an Argentine ant colony in Europe that stretches about 3,700 miles. A colony in Japan has over 306 million workers and the colony in California covers over 560 miles!
• Most animals can’t survive temperatures of 127° F, but the Sahara Silver Desert Ant can!
• There is more biomass of ants than there is human biomass on earth.
• The oldest ants date back 120 million years to the Cretaceous Era. They walked with the dinosaurs!
• Some ants collect sap from trees and use it as medicine to fight parasites.
• Leaf Cutter ants are one of the oldest know farmers on earth. The Leaf Cutters have been farming fungus for about 50 million years.
• Ants are found on all continents with the exception of ANTarctica. Shouldn’t they call it Anti-arctica?
• There are approximately 10 quadrillion ants on the planet. That is 10,000,000,000,000,000 ants!
• Ants use celestial objects and shadows to navigate. They navigate by the position of the sun and the shadows they create leaving and returning to their nest!
• If you know an interesting fact about ants that’s not listed, send your ANT FACT to info@tynkertopia.org! We’ll add it to our list of ANT FACTS right here on our website!