Ant Facts & Trivia: Twenty Quadrillion of Them

• There are roughly 20 quadrillion (20 × 10^15) ants alive on Earth at any moment, with a combined dry weight of about 12 megatons of carbon.
• Ant biomass exceeds the combined biomass of every wild bird and wild mammal on the planet, and equals about 20% of human biomass.
• Ants account for just 1.2% of all terrestrial arthropod species but at least 6% of all terrestrial arthropod biomass.
• The Dracula ant (Mystrium camillae) snaps its mandibles at peak velocities of 90 metres per second, completing the strike in as little as 23 microseconds — the fastest animal appendage ever measured.
• A trap-jaw ant (Odontomachus bauri) strike lasts 0.13 milliseconds — about 2,300 times faster than a human eye-blink. Trap-jaw ants are usually presented as holding the outright record for fastest animal movement. They held it in 2006, but lost it in 2018: the Dracula ant's snap-jaw hits 90 m/s in 23 microseconds, against the trap-jaw's 35–64 m/s in 130 microseconds. Trap-jaws are still the fastest jaws that close from an open position.
• The first high-resolution global map of ant diversity was built from nearly 1.5 million location records covering more than 14,000 species, gridded into 20 km squares.
• The Saharan silver ant (Cataglyphis bombycina) runs at 855 mm per second — 108 times its own body length every second — swinging its legs at up to 1300 mm/s and taking up to 47 strides per second.
• The oldest ant specimen known to science is a 113-million-year-old 'hell ant' from northeastern Brazil, described in Current Biology in April 2025.
• A single Argentine ant supercolony stretches over 6,000 km from Italy to the Spanish Atlantic coast, making it the largest cooperative unit ever recorded in any animal.
• Fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) link into living rafts that stay afloat for months, gripping each other with mandibles, tarsal claws and adhesive foot pads.
• About 240 species of attine ants are farmers, and every one of them depends on its cultivated fungus as its sole food source.
• Leafcutter ants — the ones that run industrial-scale fungus farms — only evolved about 8 to 12 million years ago. The headline 'ants invented farming 60 million years before humans' is about the attine lineage as a whole, which began cultivating fungus on decaying plant matter deep in the Palaeogene. The leafcutters everyone pictures — the marching green-leaf convoys — are a late offshoot, roughly 8 to 12 million years old, not 60.
• Exploding ants of the Colobopsis cylindrica group kill themselves in combat by rupturing their own abdomen to spray sticky, irritant gland contents over rivals — a behaviour called autothysis.
• Ants infected by the 'zombie' fungus Ophiocordyceps bite into leaf veins at a synchronised time of day — around noon — before dying, and a fungal stalk later erupts from the back of the dead ant's head.
• Army ants (Eciton burchellii) build no nest at all — the colony's 100,000 to 2,000,000 workers form a living shelter called a bivouac by hooking their bodies together with specialised tarsal hooks.
• Desert ants measure how far they have walked by counting strides: gluing pig-bristle 'stilts' onto their legs makes them overshoot the nest, and clipping their legs into 'stumps' makes them stop short.
• A black garden ant (Lasius niger) queen has been recorded living 28 years, while her worker daughters normally last only one to two.
• Five ant species — the yellow crazy ant, red imported fire ant, African big-headed ant, little fire ant and Argentine ant — appear on the IUCN's list of 100 of the World's Worst Invasive Alien Species.

“All the ants on Earth weigh about as much as all the humans on Earth.” This was the single most-repeated ant fact for two decades, and it is wrong. It came from loose 1990s–2010s estimates of 70–100 megatons of carbon. The 2022 systematic count put global ant biomass at 12.3 Mt C — roughly one fifth of human biomass. Ants still outweigh every wild bird and mammal combined, which is remarkable enough.

“Ants never sleep — they work around the clock.” They sleep constantly, just in tiny instalments. Filmed continuously, fire ant workers took roughly 253 naps a day of about 1.1 minutes each, adding up to nearly five hours of sleep. Queens slept far more deeply: about 92 episodes of six minutes, totalling 9.4 hours a day. Because worker naps are staggered, the colony as a whole never appears to stop — which is where the myth comes from.

“The queen runs the colony and gives the workers their orders.” No ant gives orders to any other ant. The queen is a specialised egg-layer, not a commander; she has no communication channel for issuing instructions. Foraging, nest repair, brood care and war all emerge from local rules — mainly the rate at which individual ants bump antennae and smell each other. Stanford's Deborah Gordon compares a colony to a brain: no neuron tells the others what to do either.

“There is one 'flying ant day' each summer when all the winged ants emerge at once.” A multi-year public survey in the UK found winged ants flying on 96% of days between early June and early September. There is a flying ant season, not a day, with several short peaks whose timing shifts year to year. Ants only flew above 13°C and in winds under 6.3 m/s, so warm still spells produce the mass emergences people notice. About 90% of the flying ants collected were a single species, the black garden ant Lasius niger.

“Ants can lift 5,000 times their own body weight.” That number is real but it is not a lifting figure. Ohio State engineers anaesthetised Allegheny mound ants (Formica exsectoides), glued them into a centrifuge and spun them until their heads tore off; the neck joint failed somewhere between 3,400 and 5,000 times body weight. It is a structural breaking strain measured on a dead-still insect, not a load an ant can pick up and carry. Real carrying figures are far lower — National Geographic puts some workers at around 50 times their own body weight.

Ants carry both horror and heart on screen. Them! (1954) launched the giant-bug cycle with irradiated ants in the New Mexico desert; the same year The Naked Jungle sent Charlton Heston against army-ant marabunta. Saul Bass's only feature, Phase IV (1974), gave desert ants a cold geometric intelligence, and Empire of the Ants (1977) adapted H.G. Wells. Then 1998 delivered duelling CG anthills six weeks apart: DreamWorks' Antz and Pixar's A Bug's Life. The Ant Bully followed in 2006. Marvel's Ant-Man debuted in Tales to Astonish #27 (1962) and reached cinemas in Ant-Man (2015), Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) and Quantumania (2023). In music, Adam and the Ants built a whole persona on the insect around Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980), and Frank Sinatra's "High Hopes" (1959) hangs on an ant and a rubber tree plant. Games run from Maxis' SimAnt (1991) to Microids' Unreal Engine 5 Empire of the Ants, released 7 November 2024. Offline, Uncle Milton's Ant Farm — inspired by a 1956 picnic — sold over 20 million units.

Individual ants almost never get names, so the genuinely famous ones are museum specimens and cartoons. Sphecomyrma freyi is the ant Edmund Frey and his wife picked out of amber in the cliffs at Cliffwood, New Jersey in 1966; E.O. Wilson, Frank Carpenter and William L. Brown Jr. described it in 1967, the first Cretaceous ant anyone had ever examined, and named it for its finder. Vulcanidris cratensis is a single 113-million-year-old "hell ant" in Brazilian limestone, spotted by Anderson Lepeco in the collections of the Museu de Zoologia da Universidade de São Paulo and published in Current Biology on 24 April 2025. Fictional ants have had easier fame: Hanna-Barbera's Atom Ant (1965), Z and Princess Bala in Antz (1998), Flik and Princess Atta in A Bug's Life (1998), and Antie, the pet ant in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989).