What is an ant? Ants are insects, they have six legs and each leg has three joints. Ant legs are very strong. Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get an Original Essay With his little legs, he can lift twenty-five times his own weight. They have two stomachs. One stomach contains its food and the second contains food to share with other ants. The outside of their body is covered in hard armor. This is called the exoskeleton. Ants have four stages of growth: egg, larva, pupa and adult. There are over 100,000 known species of ants. Each ant colony has at least one or more queens. The job of queens is to lay eggs. How does she start her colony? Well, in the spring, all the males and young winged queens leave their nests, fly high into the air and mate. The few queen ants that survive this nuptial flight drop their wings and instinctively begin looking for a place to start a new ant colony. After making a nest, the young queen closes the entrance and begins to lay eggs. Part of the first batch is eaten by the queen for food. When the surviving eggs hatch, they become like larvae. After a few weeks, each larva spins a cocoon on itself and pupates. In a few more weeks, adult workers will emerge. It is their job to hunt for food and enlarge the nest. More and more workers will develop and the colony will become very organized. The new workers will fully take over as guardians of the eggs, larvae and pupae. Now the queen's only duty is to lay more and more eggs, thousands over the course of her life. Many wingless workers develop and help expand the nest into a complex network of tunnels and chambers that will eventually house thousands of ants. When the colony is well established, the queen begins to lay eggs which develop into queens and males. It takes a few years before a colony grows large enough to send out winged males and young queens to found new colonies. The cycle will now start again. Ant nests come in all shapes and sizes. One tropical species built a nest that extended forty feet below the surface of the ground. Another species built nets covering an area the size of a tennis court. The best time for ants to build a nest is after the rain. Moist soil is easier to work. There are many rooms in an ant nest. Some rooms are used to store food. Some are used for storing ant eggs. There are rooms for the storied ants to rest. There are even rooms for socializing! When it is cold, the ant colony moves down to the deeper parts of the nest where it is warmer. The reason we find ants under stones is also for heat. The stones become hot from the sun and stay hot during the night. The heat will radiate into the nest and keep both young and older ants warm. Ants are social insects. Most insects don't have family lives, but ants are different. Ants have families and live in communities. They are all related in the colony because the queen ant is the mother of all ants. In the colony, each ant works for the well-being of the entire community. Each ant has its job and does it very well. Ants are everywhere, theycan be a big problem for people when they invade the wood of a house, causing the wood to collapse. They even nest between walls. When ants invade wooden beams, they dig large interconnected chambers to make their nests. It’s all this chewing that weakens the wood. When people discover that ants are eating their house, there is only one way to get rid of them: extermination! An ant's jaws are very powerful. Their powerful jaws not only gnaw wood, but are also used to fight enemies. Once an ant bites its enemy, don't expect it to let go, even if it is torn to pieces. Their jaws are also used for grasping, carrying, cutting food and carrying their young. Ant jaws work differently than human jaws. The ants' jaws move from side to side. In fact, they have two sets of jaws. The set that moves from side to side are called mandibles, the other set is called Marilee. These jaws chew food into very small pieces. Pieces that the tongue moves up and passes into a pocket below the opening of the mouth that contains the contracting muscles. Muscular action extracts liquid from pieces of food. Since ants mainly swallow liquids, they spit out whatever food is left. Ants can't use their jaws to talk, but they communicate very well. They communicate in particular by touching each other with their antennae. They also communicate by producing chemicals called pheromones. These chemicals can emit different types of information. The taste or smell of a certain pheromone can warn of danger or mark a trail. Some ants can also communicate with each other through sounds. The sounds they make are similar to those of a cricket or a katydid, but less loud. Additionally, sounds communicating information are made if an ant rubs its armor-like body against another ant. Although the ant cannot speak, it has great communication skills. There are approximately 100,000 species of ants. They are usually black, brown or rust colored. Some are yellow, some are purple, some are green and some are even blue. There are too many to write about them all, but here is some information on a few species of ants. Amazonian ants cannot survive without slaves. They attack other ants' nests and kidnap the pupae, then wait for them to become adults. The slave ants accept the Amazon ants as their own, because they don't know they were kidnapped as pupae. These slave ants will spend their entire lives working for the Amazonian ants. The Amazon ant has a sickle-shaped jaw, excellent for fighting but completely useless for taking care of itself or its own larvae. They must depend on their slaves to survive. Harvester Ants Harvester ants can be found almost anywhere in the world. In the southwestern United States, they build huge nests. The mound above ground can be twenty to thirty feet in diameter and six feet or more in the ground, with sixty thousand to ninety thousand ants living inside. Harvester ants collect and store seeds in their nest. They chew the grains to obtain a soft pulp and feed it to the growing larvae. The adult ant will not eat the pulp unless there is a drought and no other food source is available. During periods of rain, ants do not allow.