Summer’s coming. With summer, in much of the country, comes picnics. And as sure as night follows day, with picnics come ants.
Ants are, from a biologist’s standpoint, pretty cool. And they’re amazingly successful; the total biomass, that is to say, the combined weight of all the ants on Earth, will easily outweigh the biomass of humans. There are, according to some estimates, between one and ten quadrillion ants on the planet. If that’s a hard number to wrap your head around, here it is in scientific notation: That would be between 1015 and 1016 ants. A quadrillion is a 10 followed by 15 zeroes. Anyway you slice it, that’s a lot of ants.
Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae, related to bees and wasps, the three types being in the order Hymenoptera. They have distinct features, like their elbowed antennae and a node structure on the narrow…
