We like to think of farming, medicine and cities as human inventions. But ants got there first, often by millions of years. Ants have been around for more than 100 million years, and there are about 20 quadrillion of them alive today. That's about 2.5 million ants for every person on Earth. With that much time and that many ants, they've solved a lot of the same problems we have.
Here are 10 things ants did long before us, starting with how they feed themselves and ending with how they rule the world.
1. Farming
About 66 million years ago, right after the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, some ants started growing fungus for food. Scientists figured this out by comparing the DNA of hundreds of ants and fungi. Today, leafcutter ants cut leaves, chew them into mush, and use it to feed huge underground fungus gardens. Humans only started farming about 12,000 years ago. Read more in Ants Invented Farming.
2. Raising livestock
Farmers need animals as well as crops, and ants have those too. Many ants keep herds of aphids, tiny bugs that drink plant sap and give off a sweet liquid called honeydew. The ants protect them and "milk" them, like people with cows. Japanese garden ants even control their herd's mix: they protect herds that are mostly green aphids, which make better honeydew, so the faster-breeding red aphids don't take over.
3. Using antibiotics
Every farmer has to fight crop diseases. Leafcutter ants carry helpful bacteria on their bodies that make antibiotics, chemicals that kill germs. The ants use them to keep harmful fungus out of their gardens. People didn't start using antibiotics as medicine until the 1900s.
4. Quarantines
Ants don't only protect their crops from disease. They protect their livestock too. When aphids get covered in deadly fungus spores, some ants spot them and carry them off the plant before the disease spreads. Wood ants removed over 80% of aphids dusted with spores in one study, compared with under 8.3% of clean ones. Read more in Ants Quarantine Sick Aphids.
5. Something like vaccines
Ants protect themselves from disease too. When a deadly fungus gets into a colony of invasive garden ants, healthy ants groom the spores off their sick sisters. In the process, they catch tiny, harmless doses of the fungus. Scientists found that these small infections help prepare the groomers' bodies to fight off the real thing later, a bit like how a vaccine works. See Why ants have better healthcare than you.
6. Field medics
From fighting germs, ants moved on to treating wounds. African Matabele ants hunt termites, and termite soldiers often bite off their legs. Injured ants call for help with a chemical signal, and their sisters carry them home and lick their wounds clean. Without that care, about 80% of injured ants died within a day. With it, only about 10% did.
7. Surgery
Some ants go even further than cleaning wounds. In 2024, scientists found that Florida carpenter ants amputate, or cut off, their sisters' legs when a leg is badly hurt near the top. Cutting the leg off stops an infection from spreading into the body. About 90% of amputated ants survived and went back to work on five legs. The ants even chose different treatments depending on where the wound was, which scientists had only seen in humans before.
8. Landfills
Big societies make a lot of trash, and ants deal with theirs. Leafcutter ants carry dead fungus, old leaves and dead ants to garbage dumps outside the nest, away from their food. Just like our landfills, these dumps give off greenhouse gases as tiny microbes break the trash down. Read more in Leafcutter Ants Have a Greenhouse Gas Problem.
9. Air conditioning
Millions of ants and a giant fungus garden underground need fresh air. Leafcutter nests have tunnels that work like chimneys. At night, the warm air inside the nest rises out through the vents and pulls stale air away. Scientists found that nest vents can let out up to 100,000 times more carbon dioxide than the soil around them.
10. A global empire
Finally, ants built societies bigger than any country. Argentine ants form "supercolonies," where millions of nests cooperate instead of fighting. One stretches about 900 km along the California coast. And the main supercolonies in California, Europe and Japan seem to be one giant family: ants from all three don't fight each other, even though they live on different continents. Read more in The Argentine Ant World War.
What ants teach us
Ants don't have big brains, schools or governments. They worked out farming, medicine and cities through millions of years of trial and error, with each colony following simple rules. When we discover something "new," it's worth checking whether the ants got there first.
Further reading
- Schultheiss, P. et al. (2022). The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth. PNAS.
- Schultz, T. R. et al. (2024). The coevolution of fungus-ant agriculture. Science.
- Currie, C. R. et al. (1999). Fungus-growing ants use antibiotic-producing bacteria to control garden parasites. Nature.
- Konrad, M. et al. (2012). Social transfer of pathogenic fungus promotes active immunisation in ant colonies. PLoS Biology.
- Frank, E. T. et al. (2018). Wound treatment and selective help in a termite-hunting ant. Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
- Frank, E. T. et al. (2024). Wound-dependent leg amputations to combat infections in an ant society. Current Biology.
- Sunamura, E. et al. (2009). Intercontinental union of Argentine ants. Insectes Sociaux.
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