The Strength of Ants

It isn’t common to be able to see the power and strength of ants in play, but a recent set of photographs have revealed the kind of teamwork and power that the average ant in the wild can pull off.

These Indonesian ants carry off seeds that are three to four times their size, and far heavier, and they even do it in tiers of passing off the seeds to each other and all while dangling from a single branch. This kind of feat of strength isn’t all that unusual for ants though. The average ant is capable of lifting and carrying around 10 to 20 times its own body weight, which makes ants one of the strongest creatures in the world.

What is unusual is being able to see that strength in action, and so close up. We also get to see the kind of teamwork that these ants utilize by reaching lower down on the branch with stacking on top of each other, and even where they fend off a white spider as a group.

The pictures show just how capable ants are, and the teamwork they can achieve. When some of the ants finished their job of carrying one seed, they went back to help the others still bringing seeds in which made it go faster for all of them. Truly this is one of those remarkable things that you likely won’t get to see close up without the camera technique that was utilized to capture these photos.