Ant

Ants are the most familiar of all social insects and probably the most cognitively underestimated. In aggregate, all ants on Earth outweigh all wild birds and mammals combined. Individual ants are relatively simple; ant colonies solve complex optimization problems — traffic management, fungal agriculture, climate control — through entirely decentralized coordination with no individual directing any other.

Facts you didn't know

• 1

  Leafcutter ants don't eat leaves — they carry them underground to fertilize fungal gardens, then eat the fungi. They weed competing molds, apply antibiotic secretions from symbiotic bacteria growing on their bodies, and have maintained this agricultural system for approximately 50 million years — the oldest continuous agriculture on Earth.

• 2

  Some ant species take other ants as slaves — raiding neighboring colonies, stealing pupae, and raising them to work in the raiding colony. The enslaved ants have been documented rebelling by destroying the raiders' eggs and brood.

• 3

  Ants farm aphids — herding them, moving them to productive plants, protecting them from predators, and stroking them to stimulate honeydew production. Some species have domesticated aphids so thoroughly that the aphids have lost the ability to disperse independently.

• 4

  Army ant swarms navigate without any individual knowing the route — each ant follows chemical trails left by others, and the colony collectively solves route optimization problems that match algorithmic solutions. This principle now underlies network routing protocols in telecommunications.

• 5

  An ant can carry 10–50 times its own body weight and sustain this for hours. Scaled to human proportions, this is equivalent to carrying a small car — possible because their exoskeleton distributes force in a way soft-bodied animals cannot.