Large ant coloniesformicary (plural formicaries) An ant colony, a pile of earth built by ants in which they nest.https://en.wiktionary.org › wiki › formicary
In Brief. Some kinds of ants live in tight-knit colonies containing thousands or millions of individuals that go to war with other colonies over resources such as territory or food. The diverse tactics these insects use in combat can be remarkably similar to human war strategies, varying according to what is at stake.
Just like humans, ants are known to resort to excessively aggressive warfare tactics that include mass killings, looting enemy homes, chemical warfare, and even killing women and children. Any animal species with a large population has the resources to launch large-scale attacks.
If a colony perceives that there is a threat of losing resources, of losing territory, from either another species of ants or another colony of the same species, then that threat develops an organized aggressive response, which might sometimes lead to an actual battle.
During a fight, the stinging ants mount on their enemies and pierce them using their stings. Other species of ant spray their enemies with formic acid, a poisonous substance. Some ant fights are so serious that some fighting ants end up being torn into pieces and eventually die.
These are chemicals that send signals to other ants. Pheromones send messages of a food source, sexual desire, and death. It is advised not to squash ants, doing so will only release pheromones and trigger more ants to come to the location and cause more trouble to you and your family.
Ants become the pallbearer
After a few days the dead ant is carried off and placed on the “ant graveyard” by the other dead ants. This may seem like ants have complex feelings and need a few days to grieve before they dispose of the body, but in reality it's far more chemical than that.
Many ants can release special chemicals into the air that other ants can sense and respond to. These chemicals are called pheromones (FAIR-UH-MONES). Ants are famous in the world of biology for using pheromones to warn other ants about danger or guide them to food.
On the conservative side, there are some 2.5 million ants for every person on Earth. Who would win in a fight, you or 2.5 million ants?
Ants don't have complex emotions such as love, anger, or empathy, but they do approach things they find pleasant and avoid the unpleasant. They can smell with their antennae, and so follow trails, find food and recognise their own colony.
To the naked eye, ants deal with their dead much like humans. When a member of the colony dies, the carcass will lie where it fell for a period of roughly two days. In the fashion of a wake, this time period presumably gives the other ants time to pay their respects to their fallen comrade.
In an experiment a powerful radioactive source (sufficient to kill humans in short order) was left by a nest of common European black ants. After a long period (some weeks or months I think) most of the surrounding plant matter had died but the ants were seemingly completely unaffected.
Strength. Calculated up, people definitely outweigh ants, at least in modern times. If we were to have had this competition just 100 years ago, they would have stood supreme. When it comes to strength, all ants together could lift 22 trillion pounds, plenty to pick up the whole of humanity and carry them on their backs ...
Ants are good at communicating, and an ant dying lets its fellow colony members know about death. What is this? Ants, however, do not come to the scene of death to attack you or seek revenge. On the contrary, ants come near the dead and as a response to any danger.
Individual ants have tiny brains but together the many ants of a colony can exhibit remarkable 'intelligence'. Ants exhibit complex and apparently intelligent behaviour; they can navigate over long distances, find food and communicate, avoid predators, care for their young, etc.
Slave-making ants, as their name implies, excel at kidnapping enemy species' babies and turning them into mindless automatron workers.
As far as entomologists are concerned, insects do not have pain receptors the way vertebrates do. They don't feel 'pain,' but may feel irritation and probably can sense if they are damaged. Even so, they certainly cannot suffer because they don't have emotions.
Titanomyrma giganteum is the biggest ant species that ever lived on earth. The workers were 1-3cm long, but queens were 5.5cm long with a wingspan of 13cm.
Social insects communicate mouth-to-mouth. If you've ever watched ants, you've probably noticed their tendency to "kiss," quickly pressing their mouths together in face-to-face encounters. That's how they feed each other and their larvae.
Bumping into each other is another way ants correspond. When ants want to alert others about something that could be useful to their colony, they use their antennas to touch or “bump” other ants to pick up their scent. This lets them smell the unique scent of each ant before informing them of their discovery.
Then, if the would-be attacker—a much larger weaver ant, say—doesn't back off, one or more tiny ants bite down on it, angle their backsides in close, and flex so hard that their abdomens burst at the seams. By tearing themselves apart, the ants sacrifice themselves to protect the rest of the colony.
When an ant is injured in a fight, it calls its mates for help by excreting a chemical substance which makes them carry their injured comrade back to the nest. Erik T. Frank already described this rescue service in 2017.
Over 15 years ago, researchers found that insects, and fruit flies in particular, feel something akin to acute pain called “nociception.” When they encounter extreme heat, cold or physically harmful stimuli, they react, much in the same way humans react to pain.
While these insects don't literally scream, they actually produce sounds. Scientifically speaking, there are several species of ants that normally stridulate. These are shrill and repetitive sounds that are produced when the ants strike their body parts on certain areas of their colonies.