Ants are little wingless insects living in a complex social colony, usually in anthills.
Ants colonies may comprise from a few dozens of ants to several millions of them. The estimated figure for the number of ants living on earth is 10 millions of billions.
The total mass of all these little insects (insects of a few millimeters tall and that weight an average of 5 milligrams) is heaviest than the mass of all the mammals living on earth. Put every humans and other mammals on a weigh-scale and just think that even them are no match for ants.

Ants may fit in any kind of environment (except in your water-full bathtub). One ant was even found at a 22 km depth in an Asian cave. They have a social and collective behavior. Ants interact and each of them is part of a specific social cast that specifies their tasks and their role in a colony. There 's a majority of female ants. Among them stands out 2 classes: the queens, the laying ants, and the workers. Males are cheating lovers: they fly away from the colony as soon as they reproduced to put his semen into a new queen.

Ants society is based on the division of labor. Among workers, some are assigned to build the hill, others to find food or to defend the camp. Interactions between ants allow us to think that there is a collective intelligence characterizing these small insects. They communicate, find their way, and detect food through their olfactory system. They may produce sounds for other ants to come to the rescue when a prey is to heavy to be carried by a small group. Some families have unusual behaviors: some queens may cut the abdomen of the male after the breeding, some ants store food in their abdomen for the whole colony, some are travelers and others live on slavery.