Ants — The Little Creatures That Run the World

Duration: 4 hours

Target Audience: Anyone who is interested in science, life, joy, nature and the cosmos

Brief:

Ants are little creatures that run the world. The word ‘Ant’ is derived from  Ante  of middle English. West Germanic  amatijo  meaning ‘the biter’.  Ai   means  ‘off or away’ and   mait  means to cut. Family name is  Formicidae   which  is derived from the Latin Formica. Sanskrit  name is  Vamrah . In Greek  it is  Myrmex . Study of ants is known as Myrmicology.

Ants are social Insects (Eusociality). They belong to the family  Formicidae . There are more than 12,500 out of an estimated total of 22,000 species. A million ants would fit into a human body. By weight, on our Earth, weight of ants is equal to the weight of Humans. There are many kinds of ants: Fire ants, army ants, harvester ants, weaver ants, leaf-cutter ants, carpenter ants and wood ants. 

Some remarkable qualities of ants that they are:
  1. Never lazy
  2. Stupendous strength
  3. Fearless
  4. Incorruptible (Individual is nothing, colony is everything); Team work
  5. Not greedy, unselfish (Food-sharing, Death)
  6. Clean
  7. Beautiful
  8. Very frugal
  9. Without going to school, they seem to know a lot (Anatomy of Insects, Birds, Trees etc.)
  10. If you have seen one, you have seen them all
  11. Only wildlife we see everyday
  12. Only wildlife we kill most
  13. They can't drown in water
14. They don't get hurt
15. They can count (up to 100 or more)
16. They invented agriculture fifty million years before humans invented it
17. Most living things are on their ‘menu’
18. They invented antibiotics forty million years humans invented them
19. They are highly efficient (specialization)
20. They never complain
21. They colonized the whole world more successfully than empires
22. Recent developments in problem solving (Swarm Intelligence) and Swarmbots (Robotics) came from ants
There are four ways of looking at ants:
The First Way : The ant as an individual
The Second Way : The ant colony as a society
The Third Way : The ant colony as an organism
The Fourth Way : The ant colony as a mind

Outline of Lecture

This lecture will cover: (1) Anatomy of ants, (2) Life cycle of ants, (3) Nest building, (4) Communication, (5) Locomotion and navigation, (6) Troubles of ants, and (7) Scientists’ attempts to imitate ants.
Benjamin Franklin said,” None preaches better than the ant, because it says nothing”.