30-09-2010, 04:11 PM
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 | HALAKU KHAN | | Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: PAKISTAN Age: 41
Posts: 373
Contact Number: +923007970483 Program / Discipline: Mass Communication Class Roll Number: 32456 | |
 10 Most Incredible Things About Ants
Ants are the world’s busiest clean-up crew; disposing of dead bodies left behind by other predators or natural death. The facts about ants are incredible and give new prospective to the importance of the colonies, just beneath our feet.
Ants are fascinating little creatures that go about their day searching for food that other predators have abandoned. The rotting dead bodies of prey litter the unseen landscape, just awaiting nature’s clean-up crew to dispose of it properly. Ants are just one of nature’s built-in mechanisms that go to work right away, so to clean-up the messes that others leave behind.
Photo Source
- There are between 12-20 thousand species of ants currently known living in the world and equally impressive; now scientists believe that there are an estimated one quadrillion individual ants creeping and crawling beneath our feet around the world.
- Ants are incredibly strong as an ant can carry an amazing fifty times their body weight long distances. To put this into perspective, the strongest man in the world can only lift approximately 4 ½ times body weight and only for a short time. Mark Henry is considered by body building elites to be the strongest man in the world; as Mark Henry weighs in at 215 pounds and squatted an incredible 933 lbs.
- According to “The Inquisitr ” one of the largest ant colonies ever discovered stretched four thousand miles across Europe and is thought to consist of billions upon billions of ants. If you are interested in watching an impressive video and learning more about this awesome swarm, then click on the link above.
- Most ants are not picky eaters. Depending on the type of ant, the diet range widely. Fire ants for example, are not just opportunist only feasting on dead animals and other insects, but these ants will kill small prey and each other to fill their bellies. Some ants will eat fruits and vegetables to satisfy a sweet craving and yet, there is the leaf cutter ant, which prefer to cut leafs and drag them back to their nest where a special kind of fungus then grows, in which the colony will use for a food supply.
- There are three types of ant that make up a colony; starting with the queen, and then the males, and then the workers. Each type of ant has a unique set of responsibilities that contributes to a healthy colony. The queen will lay hundreds to thousands of eggs per day and the males will mate with the queen, while the workers will hunt for food and tend to the nest. Only the queen ant has wings, while the workers, which are females, do not have wings.
- The majority of ant queens can only lay several hundred eggs per day, but the African Diver Ant lays between 3 to 4 million eggs per month or 100 thousand or more eggs per day. That is an incredible amount of egg laying for any momma.
Photo Source Army Ants
7. Army ants hunt in massive swarms as known as raids and can kill small rodents, birds and insects, but what makes these raiders such an incredible force to be reckoned with, is that a single swarm can devour up to one-hundred thousand insects and animals per day.
Photo Source Bullet Ant
8. Bullet Ants are typically native to the Amazon River Basin and processes a very potent poisonous sting. This ant’s sting is considered to be the most painful of any ant in the world, which have been reported to feel like being shot with a bullet. The adult bullet ants feed only on nectar, but when the ants are young, they are fed insects and other meats of small animals.
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Photo Source Fire Ants
9. The Fire Ant has a painful sting and is statically responsible for killing more people in the United States each year than any other type of ant. This ant can be devastating to the landscape and cause people to scramble to safety when they are on the march.
10. Ants are not only very strong, extremely busy clean-up crews and breed faster than rabbits, but they also build incredible underground nests. The world’s largest anthills can consist of hundreds of millions to ten of billions of ants and millions of horny queens. The nests can stretch for miles and have reached depths of 25 feet or more. Checkout the video above for more incredible information about one such anthill above.
Watch more @ YouTube - Worlds Biggest Ant Hill AMAZING 
Last edited by .BZU.; 01-10-2010 at 01:10 AM.
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