Queens are presumed to live up to eight months and workers – for a few months on average. Unlike queens, males tend to live for about a week. The nests of the odorous ants can vary in size – from a few hundred to thousands of worker ants.
Depending on the species, some queen ants will live between 10 – 20 years with the longest living known ant queen surviving for 28 years.
Kutter & Stumper (1969) state that ant workers can live 7-8 years but queens can live almost 30 years.
The ants that lived in groups of ten survived for about sixty-six days, on average. The solitary ants died after just six and a half. (Ants that lived with larvae or in pairs had intermediate life spans, averaging twenty-two and twenty-nine days, respectively.)
For the queen in any colony, their life may span up to around 15 years, while the worker ants live for roughly 7 years. This is, of course, if they can avoid predators and other dangers. For a reproductive male – one of the flying ant types – the lifespan is much shorter at around only 2 weeks.
Each ant's brain is simple, containing about 250,000 neurones, compared with a human's billions. Yet a colony of ants has a collective brain as large as many mammals'. Some have speculated that a whole colony could have feelings.
Ants, or other insects, cannot make their way into a living human brain via the ears, nor would it be possible for them to actually stay alive in the brain even if they could. The aural system and the brain itself has a number of defence mechanisms and physical properties that make such an invasion impossible.
The answer is yes, though the sleeping behaviour of most ants resembles more of a power nap than an eight-hour knock-out. A variety of studies have shown that workers may take anywhere from eight minutes of rest every 12 hours, to over 250 one-minute naps in one day; often at irregular intervals.
In fact, there's mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of feelings. They can be literally buzzing with delight at pleasant surprises, or sink into depression when bad things happen that are out of their control.
Their exoskeletons are strong, and their internal organs can be pushed around quite a bit. All the ants you see walking about are adults, so they cannot molt and cannot regenerate lost limbs. However, they do have some ability to heal when injured, such as if they've been cut or punctured.
Ants adhere to a caste system, and at the top is the queen. She's born with wings and referred to as a princess until she takes part in the nuptial flight, mates with a male ant, and flies off to start her own colony.
35-million-year-old army ant is the oldest on record.
1. Are ants blind? Ants have two fairly large compound eyes and can detect movement pretty well. Several ant species, such as army ants, spend the majority of their life underground and are completely blind.
A female ant's fate to become a worker or queen is mainly determined by diet, not genetics. Any female ant larva can become the queen – those that do receive diets richer in protein. The other larvae receive less protein, which causes them to develop as workers.
The queens of some ants are particularly long-lived and have the potential to produce millions of offspring during their life. To do so, queens store many sperm cells, and this sperm must remain viable throughout the years of storage.
While the queen is alive, she secretes pheromones that prevent female worker ants from laying eggs, but when she dies, the workers sense the lack of pheromones and begin fighting each other to take on the top role.
Individual ants have tiny brains but together the many ants of a colony can exhibit remarkable 'intelligence'. Ants exhibit complex and apparently intelligent behaviour; they can navigate over long distances, find food and communicate, avoid predators, care for their young, etc.
Ants are good at communicating, and an ant dying lets its fellow colony members know about death. What is this? Ants, however, do not come to the scene of death to attack you or seek revenge. On the contrary, ants come near the dead and as a response to any danger.
The short answer is ants have something similar to blood, but scientists call it “haemolymph”. It is yellowish or greenish. In vertebrates (animals with backbones such as humans, cats, dogs, snakes, birds and frogs) blood's main job is to move important things around the body.
Ant colonies have specialised undertakers for the task. They usually carry their dead to a sort of graveyard or take them to a dedicated tomb within the nest. Some ants bury their dead. This strategy is also adopted by termites forming a new colony when they can't afford the luxury of corpse carriers.
Ants, like other insects, have a heart that pumps hemolymph rhythmically.
Ants are similar to many other insects in that they possess senses such as hearing, touch and smell. Although hearing is very different in ants than animals that typically have ears, ants do possess the capability to hear.
Okay, so here's the conclusion I've reached: no, the ants won't die. And they won't explode when they get to the top, either. "A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes." Many readers pointed out that ants were too small and weighed way too little for them to suffer any damage when it hit the ground.
To the naked eye, ants deal with their dead much like humans. When a member of the colony dies, the carcass will lie where it fell for a period of roughly two days. In the fashion of a wake, this time period presumably gives the other ants time to pay their respects to their fallen comrade.