Scientific classification and Facts About Ants

Scientific classification

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Arthropoda

Class: Insecta

Order: Hymenoptera

Suborder: Apocrita

Superfamily: Vespoidea

Family: Formicidae

Some Facts About Ants

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

An ant can lift 20 times its own body weight.

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

Ants don’t have ears. Ants "hear" by feeling vibrations in the ground through their feet.

When ants fight, it is usually to the death!

Can detect small movement through 5 cm of earth.

Can see polarized light.

When foraging, ants leave a pheromone trail so that they know where they’ve been,

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

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

When the queen of the colony dies, the colony can only survive a few months.

Queens are rarely replaced and the workers are not able to reproduce.

About Ants

They are social insects, which means they live in large colonies or groups. Depending on the species, ant colonies can consist of millions of ants.

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 mate with 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.

Ant colonies also have soldier ants that protect the queen, defend the colony, gather or kill food, and attack enemy colonies in search for food and nesting space. If they defeat another ant colony, they take away eggs of the defeated ant colony. When the eggs hatch, the new ants become the "slave" ants for the colony. Some jobs of the colony include taking care of the eggs and babies, gathering food for the colony and building the anthills or mounds.

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Elephants are Smart

Elephants have the largest brain, nearly 11 pounds on average of any mammal that ever walked the earth.

Do they use that gray matter to the fullest? Intelligence is hard to quantify in humans or animals,

but the encephalization quotient (EQ), a ratio of an animal’s observed brain size to the expected brain size given the animal’s mass,

correlates well with an ability to navigate novel challenges and obstacles. The average elephant EQ is 1.88. (Humans range from 7.33 to 7.69, chimpanzees average 2.45, pigs 0.27.) Intelligence and memory are thought to go hand in hand,

suggesting that elephant memories, while not infallible, are quite good.

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Parrots Understand

Parrot speech is commonly regarded as the brainless squawking of a feathered voice recorder.

But studies over the past 30 years continually show that parrots engage in much more than mere mimicry.

Our avian friends can solve certain linguistic processing tasks as deftly as 4-6 year-old children.

Parrots appear to grasp concepts like “same” and “different”, “bigger” and “smaller”, “none” and numbers.

Perhaps most interestingly, they can combine labels and phrases in novel ways.

A January 2007 study in Language Sciences suggests using patterns of parrot speech learning to develop artificial speech skills in robots.

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