Ants are so common that it's easy to ignore them. But the closer scientists look, the stranger they get. Here are 10 real ant facts that sound like they can't possibly be true, starting with how many there are and ending with how they've beaten some of the harshest places on Earth.
1. There are about 2.5 million ants for every person
In 2022, scientists combined results from 465 studies around the world and estimated there are about 20 quadrillion ants on Earth. That's a 20 with 15 zeros, or about 2.5 million ants for every human. All those ants together weigh more than all the wild birds and wild mammals on Earth combined. And that's probably an underestimate, because it doesn't count most of the ants living underground.
2. One family of ants lives on three continents
With that many ants, some families get huge. Argentine ants form "supercolonies," where millions of nests work together instead of fighting. When scientists brought Argentine ants from Europe and California to Japan, they didn't fight the ants from Japan's biggest supercolony. They treated each other like family. Read more in The Argentine Ant World War.
3. Ants were farming 66 million years before us
Big societies need a lot of food, and ants figured out how to grow it. Some ants started farming fungus about 66 million years ago, right after the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Humans only started farming about 12,000 years ago. See Ants Invented Farming.
4. Some trees make ants unable to eat anything else
Not every ant gets to choose its food. In Central America, acacia trees feed the ants that guard them with a special nectar. The ants' adult workers can't digest normal sugar, so the tree's nectar is basically the only food they can eat, and the tree helps keep it that way. The tree has turned its bodyguards into ants that can't leave. Read more in Plants That Hire Armies.
5. Ants perform surgery
Ants don't just fight to protect their colony. They also patch each other up. Florida carpenter ants bite off a sister's leg when it's badly injured near the top, which stops infection from spreading. About 90% of these amputated ants survive and go back to work on five legs. Before this was discovered in 2024, humans were the only animals known to amputate limbs as medical treatment.
6. A tapeworm can make a worker ant live as long as a queen
Ants aren't always the ones in control of their bodies. A tapeworm that lives in woodpeckers needs an ant to be eaten by a bird to complete its life cycle. Infected acorn ant workers turn yellow, stop working, and live much longer than their sisters. Over three years, they survived as well as the colony's queens, which can live for decades. Read more in The Tapeworm That Makes Ants Live as Long as Queens.
7. One ant queen gives birth to two different species
Speaking of strange families: Iberian harvester ant queens can't make workers with males of their own species. They need males from a different species, the builder harvester ant. Where those males don't live, the queens make them themselves, by laying eggs that grow into clones of another species. Read more in The Ant Queen That Gives Birth to Two Species.
8. Trap-jaw ants snap their jaws at over 230 km/h
Some ants have amazing bodies too. Trap-jaw ants have spring-loaded jaws that lock open and snap shut at over 230 kilometres per hour, one of the fastest movements in the animal world. They use them to grab prey, and they can even snap them against the ground to launch themselves into the air to escape. Read about the ants that hunt them in Skull-Collecting Ants.
9. Silver ants have hair that works like sunscreen
Some ants live where almost nothing else can. Saharan silver ants come out at the hottest time of day, when the sand can be hot enough to cook most insects, because that's when the lizards that hunt them hide from the heat. To survive, they're covered in tiny hairs shaped like triangles. Each hair works like a little prism, bouncing sunlight away and giving the ant a shiny silver look. The hairs also help the ant release its own body heat. Scientists found that ants with their hair kept cooler than ants with the hair removed.
10. Ants survived for years trapped in a nuclear bunker
And some ants survive where they never should have ended up. In 2013, researchers studying bats in an old Soviet nuclear weapons bunker in Poland found a colony of more than a million wood ants that had fallen in through a broken vent. There was no queen, no light and almost no food. The ants built a nest anyway, and mostly survived by eating their dead. When researchers later built a boardwalk up to the vent, the ants climbed out and went home. Read the full story in The Cannibal Ants of the Nuclear Bunker.
The real lesson
From global empires to surgery to surviving in a bunker, ants keep doing things we thought only humans could do. They've had over 100 million years of practice. The more we learn about them, the less special some of our own inventions look.
Further reading
- Schultheiss, P. et al. (2022). The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth. PNAS.
- Sunamura, E. et al. (2009). Intercontinental union of Argentine ants. Insectes Sociaux.
- Schultz, T. R. et al. (2024). The coevolution of fungus-ant agriculture. Science.
- Kautz, S. et al. (2009). How to prevent cheating: a digestive specialization ties mutualistic plant-ants to their ant-plant partners. Evolution.
- Frank, E. T. et al. (2024). Wound-dependent leg amputations to combat infections in an ant society. Current Biology.
- Beros, S. et al. (2021). Extreme lifespan extension in tapeworm-infected ant workers. Royal Society Open Science.
- Juvé, Y. et al. (2025). One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants. Nature.
- Shi, N. N. et al. (2015). Keeping cool: enhanced optical reflection and radiative heat dissipation in Saharan silver ants. Science.
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