Scientists created ‘one million ant city’ above ground to see how it really works

Joe Harker
2026-03-16T15:32:20.136Z
News

They found a million creatures could act with one purpose

A team of scientists wanting to know more about how ants lived created their own colony above ground with a million residents which could be better studied.

The BBC's show Planet Ant created their own city for the insects to live and work in, with cameras being inserted into the colony to spy on their activities and see what they got up to.

It was a somewhat tricky task as many of the city's denizens didn't like the cameras in their home and would swarm over them with attacks.

Wherever the camera went there were ants attacking it as they spotted the threat and kept their eggs away from it which occasionally blocked the lens and interfered with the attempts to view observe their normal routines.

After all, you're hardly seeing them living normally if they're reacting as though there's a threat around and trying to fight off what they think could be an invader.

They bring leaves to the colony and use those to grow fungus, this little guy is basically a farmer (BBC)

Nonetheless, between the aggressive bodies of the ants the scientists got to see the tiny creatures farming fungus for food by bringing leaves into the nest to feed to the fungus.

The colony of leafcutter ants would, you might assume, eat the leaves you can see them carrying but instead they were harvesting the leaves as food for their crop.

You probably know already about soldier ants and worker ants, and the scientists got close to a solder ant which started biting their hand, but there were several types of worker ants which could be told apart by their varying sizes.

After the soldier ants, the largest type there were ones known a 'media workers', though I have to say none of them have got the type of CV that'd get them a job at LADbible Towers.

Instead, their job is to carry leaves back to the nest and as we already know those leaves are brought in to feed the fungus farms.

Think of each creature as one cell of a body and you get the 'superorganism' (BBC)

The smallest of the bunch were the 'minima workers' which were the largest group of critters in the colony, and they're the ones who look after the baby ants and also work the fungus farms with the leaves brought in by the media workers.

Of course there's also one very important insect at the heart of all of this, the queen.

She can lay up to 30,000 eggs a day in the million-strong city and is responsible for birthing the new generations of ants to grow the numbers and work in the various places the city has including space for the dead ants and places to drop excess waste.

While the queen might be the most important ant, each of the million ants in the colony is functionally one part of a 'superorganism', which is where a group of many organisms effectively functions as one.

Basically, the city is like one body and the million ants are like the blood and organs that keep it working, even if each one is its own individual creature as well since the lone ant wouldn't survive without all the others to help grow food and protect the place.