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Photo Gallery - Pavement ants doing battle
Two colonies of pavement ants battle for territory. - © Alex Wild
Pavement ants are built for battle. At 3/16 of an inch, workers are
about half as long as one of your shirt buttons is wide. They are
dark reddish-black and have antennae that bulge out at the tips
so they look like they’re waving little clubs off their foreheads.
They have tough, armor-like skins called exoskeletons that can
withstand the knocks of war. If a pavement ant was the size of a
dog and you could get a good close-up look, you would see a
beautiful landscape. Their faces and bodies are covered with hilly
peaks, rivers of grooves and
hairs, and they have two little
mountains of spines poking
out from their backs toward
their rear ends.
Where neighborhoods
overlap, huge numbers of
workers from each side
collide. They furiously drum
one another on the head with
their antennae; they rip one another apart with their mandibles.
They’ll separate an individual from the pack and close in around
her, gnashing at her body with their jaws, grabbing her with their
claws, turning her into ant dust. These ants mean business when
it comes to setting boundaries. After the melee, the carnage is
astounding. Thousands of ants litter sidewalks across the
country, a jumbled dark reddish/black line of body parts and
pieces that blow around in the wind.
Take a closer look at the
battle raging down below.
When they aren’t out cruisin’ for a bruisin’, pavement ants move
along slowly compared to other ant species as though they don’t
have anything to do in this big old world but go for a walk in
nature. Unless harassed, they won’t sting you, and they aren’t
easily spooked. Whereas some ants shoo away quickly,
pavement ants usually continue to bumble along unbothered.
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