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Ants have colonised almost every landmass on Earth. Their population is estimated as between 10 16 –10 17 (10-100 quadrillion). [29] With an estimated 20 quadrillion ants their biomass comes to 12 megatons of dry carbon, which is more than all wild birds and non-human mammals combined. [30] [31] [32]
Ants (family Formicidae in the order Hymenoptera) are the most species-rich of all social insects, with more than 12,000 described species and many others awaiting description. [1] Formicidae is divided into 21 subfamilies , of which 17 are extant and four subfamilies are extinct , described from fossils .
Globally, averages of these predictions estimate there are around 1.5 million beetle species and 5.5 million insect species, with around 1 million insect species currently found and described. [3] Between 950,000–1,000,000 of all described animal species are considered insects, so over 50% of all described eukaryotes (1.8 million species) are ...
Ants have colonised almost every landmass on Earth. The only places lacking indigenous ants are Antarctica and a few remote or inhospitable islands. Ants thrive in moist tropical ecosystems and may exceed the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals. Their success in so many environments has been attributed to their social organisation and ...
Beginning in the 1990s, molecular (DNA sequence) data have come to play a central role in attempts to reconstruct the ant "tree of life".Molecular phylogenetic analyses based on multiple nuclear genes have yielded robust results that reinforce some preexisting views but overturn others – and suggest that there has been considerable morphological convergence among some ant lineages.
Carpenter ants (Camponotus spp.) are large ants (workers 7 to 13 mm or 1 ⁄ 4 to 1 ⁄ 2 in) indigenous to many forested parts of the world. [ 4 ] They build nests inside wood, consisting of galleries chewed out with their mandibles or jaws, preferably in dead, damp wood.
When the queen ant dies, there is no replacement and army ants cannot rear emergency queens. Most of the time, if the queen dies, the colony will likely die too. Queen loss can occur due to accidents during emigrations, predator attack, old age or illness. [13] However, there are possibilities to avoid colony death.
The Saharan silver ant (Cataglyphis bombycina) is a species of insect that lives in the Sahara Desert. It is the fastest of the world’s 12,000 known ant species, clocking a velocity of 855 millimetres per second (over 1.9 miles per hour or 3.1 kilometres per hour).