Creeping Into the World of Ants
Like majority of the insects, ants have six legs. Each of the legs has three joints. These legs are very strong thereby enabling the ant to run very quickly. If it were possible for a man to run as fast for his size as ants could, he could run as fast or as a racehorse or even faster. It’s also a known fact that these insects can lift and carry weights that are twenty times their own body weights. An ant’s brain carries around 250,000 brain cells while the human brain has around ten billion cells. In essence, it means that a colony of 40,000 ants has, collectively, the same size brain as that of a human.
The average life span of an ant is forty to sixty days. These insects use their antennae not only for the sense of touch, but also for the sense of smell. An ant’s head has two large and strong jaws that open and cut like a pair of scissors. An adult ant cannot chew and swallow food in solid form. Instead, it swallows the juice which it extracts, by squeezing, from the pieces of food. The dry part that is left over is normally thrown away.
Ants have two eyes that are made of smaller eyes. These are called compound eyes. The abdomen section of an ant’s body contains two stomachs. One stomach is for holding food for the ant itself while the other one is for carrying food meant to be shared with others. Like all other insects, the outside body of an ant is covered with a hard substance known as the exoskeleton. An ant has four distinct growing stages: the egg, larva, pupa and adult. Biologists have classified these insects in a special group of wasps.
An ant colony has at least one or more queens. The queen’s duty is to lay eggs while the worker’s responsibility is to look after them. A worker ant is sterile and is tasked with the responsibility of looking for food, look after the young ones and guard and defend the nest from unsolicited visitors. Ants are extremely clean and tidy insects. A section of the workers are given the job of taking litter and clutter from the nest and putting it outside in a special rubbish area. Each ant colony has a unique scent or smell that distinguishes it from other colonies. This way, foreigners can be recognized immediately. A lot of them, such as the common red species, have stings to defend their nests.
These creatures are so unique that they have been given special mention in the Bible.
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