Awesome Ants

Inspired by Bernard Werber’s eponymous fantasy novel, Empire of the Ants is a photorealistic real-time strategy game. You play as 103,683rd, the heralded savior of their ant colony. Build and expand your anthill, conquer other territories, and befriend and fight other forest creatures. Coming to PS5 in 2024.

Forgecore’s playful take on Battleship replaces ships with picnic foods and torpedoes with ants. The 3D-printed prototype has tiny sandwiches, hot dogs, watermelon, and other eats, hundreds of ants, a tablecloth playfield, and a faux wicker picnic basket for its pieces. Sign up here if you’re interested in buying one. Hopefully, Hasbro won’t stand in the way.

Ants are well known for their ability to work together to build things and accomplish tasks for their colony. In this fascinating video from Horace Zeng, we see how hundreds of fire ants work in concert to pick up, move, and place pieces of glass gravel on a piece of sticky tape, resulting in a colorfully-paved road of sorts.

Nature filmmaker Lothar Lenz is an expert at capturing macro footage of insects. In this video, we get to watch some hornets competing with a colony of ants for a drink of water. The incredible audio recording puts you right there in the action. The ants get a little feisty in this other video.

Scientists estimate that roughly 20 quadrillion ants are marching around the planet. Then they said visualizing them all was “unimaginable. VFX artist Wren from Corridor accepted that challenge and came up with a way to generate a massive virtual ant pile. The 2.5 million ants-per-person ratio is gonna keep us up at night.

Ants are fascinating creatures. While some may battle other colonies for supremacy, there are kinds of ants that enslave others. Kurzgesagt explains how Polyergus ants raid colonies and force their offspring to do their bidding until they die. They’ve become so reliant on their slaves that they can no longer care for themselves.

When red fire ants find face flood waters, they quickly evacuate their tunnels and build a raft out of their bodies. This unique evolutionary trait helps the colony survive as a whole and is quite the sight floating atop flood waters in this video from Deep Look. You definitely wouldn’t want to swim up next to this thing.

In the universe of living things, you might think that insects were pretty low in the pecking order. But as TierZoo points out, the individual abilities, collective mindset, and genetic makeup of bees, ants, and wasps make them some of the most impressive creatures on the planet.

You never want to get too close to a mound of fire ants. But from the comfortable distance of your browser, they’re neat little buggers. Vox explores some of the fascinating ways in which colonies stick together to form structures, and how they can act as both a solid or fluid.

With the help of footage from researchers, ZeFrank provides his lighthearted insights on the Odontomachus, a genus of ants with jaws that can open 180-degrees, then shut like a bear trap. In addition to grabbing prey, they can use their mandibles to eject unwanted intruders or extract themselves quickly from a threat.

ZeFrank takes a few minutes to explain the fascinating habits of Eciton army ants, from the massive community structures they build using their bodies, to their coordinated swarms, to their killer instincts and protein-rich dietary habits. You’ll also meet some unique insects that like to hitch rides on the ants.

Chip Channel spends most of his time restoring rusty old toys. He also has an ant farm. Watch as these industrious little harvester ants start out with a clean slate of sand, and proceed to build out a complex maze of tunnels for their colony to call home. Everything you see here happened in 24 hours.

Kurzgesagt introduces us to the oecophylla weaver ant. These long-legged insects dwell in tropical jungles, building incredible colonies that spread upwards and sideways between trees. They’re not only incredibly industrious, they’re fierce warriors and defenders of their kingdoms.

It might take us just a second to chomp down a single slice of banana, but it takes quite a bit longer for ants to dine on such a treat. In this clip from Temponaut Timelapse, see how an army of ants gradually dismantles a bit of banana over the course of two days. Look away if you’re squeamish about bugs.

Kurzgesagt already taught us how ants thrive on war. But it turns out that one particular ant species has used their fighting and strategic skills (with a little help from humans) to build a truly global empire. We wouldn’t doubt if their numbers were actually in the trillions.

Think that humans fight and kill a lot? Kurzgesagt aims its magnifying glass at the tiny world of ant colonies, where billions of the bugs violently battle against other kinds of ants and insects every single day of their lives. From decapitations to cannibalism, life as an ant can be brutal.

It’s common knowledge that ants are great at working together to accomplish tasks. But we’ve never seen anything quite like this massive upside-down bridge structure that thousands of army ants built so they could storm into a wasps’ nest in Costa Rica.

Amateur naturalist Zefrank takes a few minutes to explore the strange and wonderful interactions of ant colonies, and how they work together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts, along with some of the odd behaviors these insects exhibit.

BBC Earth show The Hunt captured crisp macro footage of hotrod ants, as they make their way through the scorching 150ºF+ Namib desert, where it’s so hot that they would die if they stopped in the sun for even a few seconds. But the extreme heat isn’t their only foe.

This watch won’t help you tell time at all, but you’ll still have the coolest watch on the block – since yours will be a fully-functional (though very small) ant colony. Comes with sand, a feeding dropper, tweezers, and of course, five live ants.

Scientists have uncovered some fascinating behaviors of ant colonies. When poured through a funnel, they act as a liquid, moving around each other – but when picked up or pushed down they become a sort of solid, clinging to each other.

Did you know that when ants get separated from their colony, they start following each other in a circle until they drop dead? The phenomenon looks like an insect hurricane. Nature sure is weird.