Ants first appeared on the earth between 140 to 168 million years ago, during the Jurassic period—a time when dinosaurs roamed the land and plant life consisted mostly of cone- and spore-bearing species like pines and ferns.
Ants are as old as dinosaurs
Ants are really old. Scientists believe ants have been around for millions of years. This means ants shared the planet with dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex, Triceratops, and Velociraptor. Despite their tiny size, ants survived the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs and an ice age.
Ants evidently arose during the Cretaceous period at somewhat more than 100 million years ago. Their earliest known fossils fall into two groups.
Depending on the species, some queen ants will live between 10 – 20 years with the longest living known ant queen surviving for 28 years.
The world's oldest army ant has been identified in a block of 35-million-year-old Baltic amber. The unexpected discovery suggests that the blind, belligerent insects – now common in Africa and South America – once roamed the European continent.
It would take several hundred ants to pick up each pound of the person. So you'd need to know the person's weight and then multiply that by 200 to 300 ants.
Nothomyrmecia, also known as the dinosaur ant or dawn ant, is an extremely rare genus of ants consisting of a single species, Nothomyrmecia macrops. These ants live in South Australia, nesting in old-growth mallee woodland and Eucalyptus woodland.
The garden ant is a native Australian species. Their colonies are known to grow up to 40,000 workers and some specimens apparently live up to 30 years.
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.
The queens of some ants are particularly long-lived and have the potential to produce millions of offspring during their life. To do so, queens store many sperm cells, and this sperm must remain viable throughout the years of storage.
God made so many ants because ants are important housekeepers for the earth.
The oldest insect ever found is the fossilised Rhyniognatha hirsti, which lived in what is now Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, approximately 410 million years ago - that is 30 million years older than any other known insect fossil!
Compared to humans however, ants are nearly blind and deaf. How then, do they communicate with each other? Scientists have shown that ants' main mode of communication is through “smelling” chemical signals called pheromones.
And though people typically don't think of ants as flying insects, ant sex is often a crowded, aerial event not so different from the mating flights of honeybees. Ant society is divided into several castes, including workers, soldiers, drones and queens.
Although ants are very much a nuisance and not something most people likely want inside their homes or kitchens, they do play an important role in the environment. Ants, because they build their nests underground, help aerate the soil, which makes it nutrient rich for plants to grow.
That's right, ants have two stomachs, and it's not because they are greedy. One of their stomachs is for holding food for their own consumption, and the second one is to hold food to be shared with other ants. This process is known as trophallaxis and allows an ant colony to work extremely efficiently.
Ants are similar to many other insects in that they possess senses such as hearing, touch and smell. Although hearing is very different in ants than animals that typically have ears, ants do possess the capability to hear.
If the ant test were done right, it should be 100. If the ant were given the human test, its IQ would be the lowest possible score, which is a the same score that a dolphin and whoever invented the wheel would get.
In fact, there's mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of feelings. They can be literally buzzing with delight at pleasant surprises, or sink into depression when bad things happen that are out of their control.
Echidnas have an extremely specialized diet, which has probably helped to make them so successful. No other mammal in Australia eats ants and termites, so they have no competition for food. The echidna's body is highly adapted for this diet.
They are getting ready to reach out and start a new colony. They fly in order to find a good place to start a colony and to look for suitable mates. Much of the time flying ants will emerge and set out on their swarming flights after a heavy rain, but they can also come out at other times.
Bull ants are found throughout Australia.
The Australian Green Weaver Ant (Oecophylla smaragdina) is a beautiful iridescent green. Green worker ants build nests from leaves by weaving them together into large elliptical shapes.
The gold-digging ant is a mythical insect described in classical and medieval bestiaries. They were dog- or fox-sized ants that dug up gold in sandy areas.
In the insect world, it's usually butterflies that are associated with social behavior, but according to a new study it's ants that really can't live without their peers … literally. Discovery News reports that ants died after just 6 days of isolation, whereas the socially integrated controls lived for up to 66 days.