Ant Facts

• The average life expectancy of an ant is 45-60 days.


• Like all insects, ants have six legs. Each leg has three joints.


• They have three sections to there body. Head, Thorax, Abdomen


• The ant has two eyes, each eye is made of many smaller eyes. They are called compound eyes.


• An ant can lift 20 times its own body weight.


• There are more than 12,000 species of ants all over the world.


• Ants don’t have lungs. Oxygen enters through tiny holes all over the body and carbon dioxide leaves through the same holes.


• Queen ants have wings, which they shed when they start a new nest.


• Some queen ants can live for many years and have millions of babies.


• The job of the queen is to lay eggs which the worker ants look after.


• Worker ants are sterile, they look for food, look after the young, and defend the nest from unwanted visitors.


• There are three kinds of ants in a colony: The queen, the female workers, and males.


• The queen and the males have wings, while the workers don’t have wings. The queen is the only ant that can lay eggs.


• The male ant’s job is to matewith future queen ants and they do not live very long afterwards.


• Once the queen grows to adulthood, she spends the rest of her life laying eggs! Depending on the species, a colony may have one queen or many queens.


• Many ants such as the common Red species have a sting which they use to defend their nest.


• The common Black Ants and Wood Ants have no sting, but they can squirt a spray of formic acid. Some birds put ants in their feathers because the ants squirt formic acid which gets rid of the parasites.