Ants. Creepy little things. Anyone who doesn't believe that should watch that old movie, Phase IV. That'll really put you off the little blighters for good...

Anyway: here's some randomly weird facts about Ants that remind us more of Borg than insects...

• Ants don't sleep.

• When the only queen ant dies, so does the entire colony, because no new workers are born.

• The study of ants is Myrmecology.

• For every human in the world there are one million ants and there are more than 10,000 known ant species around the world.

• The brain of an ant has about 250,000 brain cells.

• Ant brains are largest amongst insects. Mushroom shaped brain appendages have function similar to the grey-matter of human brains and it's estimated they may have the same processing power as a Macintosh II computer.

• The sense of smell of an ant is just as good as a dog's.

• Ants can lift an object up to fifty times their body-weight and carry it over their heads. They don't do this with their feet, but with their mouths.

• If a child could lift as much as an ant it would be able hurl cars down the street.

• A leaf-cutter ant queen mates only once - just before establishing a new colony. She can then keep the sperm viable for up to 15 years and produce as many as 300 million offspring.

• Ants don't have ears: they "hear" by feeling vibrations in the ground through their feet.

• Ants fight to the death: then, not content with that, they dismember their prey...

Links

• Gawker's Photo Encyclopedia of Ants

• National Geographic: Ants

• Phase IV Trailer (it doesn't do the film real justice...)