File: Ant Trophy Animals in digital format

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Ants are social insects that constitute the family Formicidae (or formicidae in French) and, with wasps and bees, are classified in the order Hymenoptera, suborder Apocrita. These eusocial insects form colonies, called anthills, sometimes extremely complex, containing from a few dozen to several million individuals. Some species form supercolonies with several hundred million individuals. Termites, sometimes called white ants for their formal and behavioral similarity, are in the order Dictyoptera (suborder Isoptera) but are not close relatives. Ant societies have a division of labor (age and caste polyethism), communication between individuals, and an ability to solve complex problems. These analogies to human societies have long been a source of inspiration and the subject of scientific study. As of 2013, more than 12,000 species have been recorded, but there are likely thousands more yet to be discovered. Participatory census, as done in 2019-2020 in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, could be a way to gain new knowledge. A cosmopolitan family (the ant has colonized all land areas except Greenland and Antarctica), it reaches high density in tropical and neotropical environments. Although ants represent less than one percent of insect species, their estimated population of one billion billion individuals is such that the mass of the myrmecofauna exceeds the weight of mankind and represents 10 to 15% of the animal biomass in many habitats, this mass combined with that of termites representing one third of the animal biomass of the Amazon forest.