Amazing Facts: It's the Ants' World, We Just Live in It.

Summer's coming. With summer, in much of the country, comes picnics. And as sure as night follows day, with picnics come ants.

Ants are, from a biologist's standpoint, pretty cool. And they're amazingly successful; the total biomass, that is to say, the combined weight of all the ants on Earth, will easily outweigh the biomass of humans. There are, according to some estimates, between one and ten quadrillion ants on the planet. If that's a hard number to wrap your head around, here it is in scientific notation: That would be between 10¹⁵ and 10¹⁶ ants. A quadrillion is a 10 followed by 15 zeroes. Anyway you slice it, that's a lot of ants.

Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae, related to bees and wasps, the three types being in the order Hymenoptera. They have distinct features, like their elbowed antennae and a node structure on the narrow waist between their thorax and abdomen. But it's their number and their behavior that make them interesting.

In size, ants can range from pests like the Pharaoh Ant, which is barely visible at about .03 inches, to the extinct Titanomyrma giganteum, a monster species where the queen could be 2 1/2" long and have a 6-inch wingspan. Their colors range from yellow to red, brown, black, and green, with some having a metallic look. There are more than 13,800 species known. There could be thousands more. Some ants are herbivores, some are predators, and some are scavengers. Ants farm, and have been doing it longer than we have. Some ants even raise livestock, specifically aphids, moving them from plant to plant and protecting them from predators in return for the aphid's sweet, sweet honeydew.

Ants can communicate using sounds, touch, and pheromones. An ant that finds a food source can actually return to the colony, leaving a scent trail, and lead other ants back to the food. And if a predator kills an ant, breaching its exoskeleton, some ants will release a pheromone that causes the rest of the colony to attack.

They defend their colonies, too. Some ants, like the bullet ant of Central and South America, have a nasty sting. And anyone in the United States will tell you tales of the infamous fire ant nests. Some ants have huge jaws and defend themselves by biting.

Key takeaway: If you're a predatory insect, best not try to take on an ant colony.

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Ants are eaten by humans in some places, in Central and South America, Asia, and Africa. That's where my curiosity about ants ends.

For every human on this planet, there are over a million ants. They live on every continent except Antarctica. They are found in almost every terrestrial environment, from pole to pole. No matter what food source is available, there is probably an ant species feeding on it. They're all females except for the short-lived, winged drone males who live only long enough to impregnate a queen, who receives enough genetic material from the male to breed thousands or even millions of workers. The unfortunate drone then dies after his one-time mating; yes, it's a lot more fun to be a dude if you're human.

Ants may be pests. They may cause us a lot of headaches. They invade our picnics, they get into our pantries, they undermine the foundations of our homes and, in the case of carpenter ants, can even damage the structure of our buildings themselves. But from a biological standpoint, anything that's this adaptable, this successful, has a weird kind of fascination to it. Ants have been around a long time. They'll probably be around after we're gone.

It really is the Planet of the Ants.

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