Animal Facts: Pick another animal or return to overview:

How do I know it was an ant and not a termite?

Ants the Formicidae:

Just what are you seeing when you watch an ant wander around? It is an individual and it is most likely either looking for food or removing debris from its nest. But it will never reproduce; so why all the work? Ants are pretty easy to watch but it is hard to understand their behavior unless you take a perspective that includes the entire colony. This is also true for honey bees and many wasps. The majority of individuals you see are female workers. What drives their behavior? Who controls their behavior? How does she do it?

Like bees, ants will recruit others to food sources. Unlike bees, they do it with chemicals. Watch an ant walking very closely. What does it do with its abdomen? Is it held up in the air or does it touch the ground now and then? The chemical language of ants is astonishing and trail making is just one of its uses. What might other uses be -- what would they be saying to each other with organic chemicals? Demonstrating that ants make and follow chemical trails is pretty easy. How would you demonstrate these things? Not challenging enough? How could you find out if the chemical trail contains other information like direction the ant should go, what is at the end, how old the trail is and so on?

Every year someone gets to see a true marvel of animal behavior -- the founding of a new ant colony. Some species of ants reproduce in the fall. They mate in large swarms and then females go off to look for a suitable place to start excavating a nest. Soon after matying the males die. Mated females may live and lay fertile eggs for many years after their single mating. Reproductive ants, at the time of mating, are easily told from workers -- they have wings! If you were designing an insect that lives in tunnels underground, would you give them wings? If you are one of the lucky few who watch ants enough, you'll get to see the ant solution to the problem wings impose for digging in the ground.

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