Name: The World War of the Ants – The Army Ant
Uploaded: 2020-02-19T02:02:21.000Z
Duration: 8 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Every day, billions of soldiers fight a merciless war​

on thousands of fronts, and it's been going on for over 100 million years.​

Ants are ancient beings that arose around 160 million years ago,​

and took over a wide variety of ecological niches so successfully​

that they became one of the dominant animals on planet Earth.​

Today, they count more than 16,000 different species​

with over 10 thousand trillion individuals.​

Collectively, ants alone make up 20% of the entire animal biomass on land.​

Similar to humans, their recipe for success is collaboration.​

together, they are able to achieve stunning feats.​

or have complex symbiotic relationships.​

Even among the same species, a constant state of conflict is pretty common.​

Skirmishes, raids, and full-on invasions​

are happening every day, causing millions of casualties.​

Let's look at some of the most interesting ones in a series of videos.​

In this one, the ​​army ant​—a swarm made for war.​

The army ant group consists of about 200 different species.​

Army ants do not build nests; they live a sort-of nomadic lifestyle​

with groups of millions of individuals.​

On a hunt, some species form large columns up to 100 meters long,​

killing and immediately dismembering every insect or small vertebrate they encounter.​

The biggest hunting parties can kill up to 500,000 animals per day.​

Some army ants specialize in hunting and consuming other social insects​

like termites, wasps, and especially other ants.​

Wasps are fierce, and may seem invulnerable,​

but if a swarm makes its way to their colonies​

The much bigger and stronger wasps might kill a few of them,​

Even if their queen survives an attack,​

the army ants steal the colony's larvae, and quickly devour them.​

When army ants discover another ant colony, they immediately attack.​

Now, you might think this would be a more even battle, but it's not.​

Because army ants act as a social unit,​

they are especially dangerous and effective.​

Most army ants are not particularly impressive individually,​

but they can overwhelm their victims with sheer numbers​

before the victim colony can mount an effective defense.​

And so, invasions tend to be won by the attackers​

and the prey colony is damaged significantly,​

Interestingly, army ants don't fight army ants.​

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The World War of the Ants – The Army Ant

overwhelmed

engage

obsession

immediately