We love animals on Laugh Again. Not just because they make us laugh, but because they’re fascinating. Did you know that a common garden snail can have 14,000 teeth? Imagine bedtime! “Doug, have you flossed those teeth?” Did you know that the world spider population consumes about 800 million metric tons of food a year? All caught on their World Wide Web.
Here’s today’s question: What’s the most common animal on earth? Here are clues. Their global population is estimated at ten thousand trillion…give or take a gazillion or two. They are found on every continent except Antarctica. 16,000 species of them. Thousands live in your backyard. Which is fine, until they move into your house.
It is the humble ant. What is the biggest ant in the world? The eleph-ant!
Ant societies are broken into 2 castes. The workers and the royal caste – the queen and her drones. Over the course of her life, a queen ant can lay up to 300 million eggs. My wife is thankful she isn’t an ant. Most of these eggs hatch into worker ants. They care for the young, dig tunnels, and gather food. Soldier ants protect the colony, others go to war with neighbouring colonies. Some do the finances. Others do the books, they’re called account-ants.
If you’ve ever stopped to watch ants hard at work, it may look chaotic. But an ant colony is like a living organism, with each individual carrying out an important task. Scientists are increasingly surprised at the complexity of ant communication. There are at least 20 different pheromones that ants use to communicate. And by combining these pheromones with taps and gestures of their antennae, ants can communicate complicated sets of instructions. They can tell their colony mates, “Hey there’s food over there, go get it.” Or “there’s a spider coming, don’t go that way, you’ll be lunch.” Or, “movie night at Joe’s tonight, bring pizza with fungus on it.”
And when an ant turns 100, it’s an ant ique. Bad joke.
The weaver ant dominates the treetops in Africa and Australia, spending their entire lives above ground. They build houses out of leaves, complete with roofs, walls, floors and rooms. To build their tree houses, they twist leaves into place. Then, get this, they bind the leaves together by grabbing hold of larva, gripping them tightly in their mandibles, and moving them back and forth over the leaf edges, like a hot glue gun. The larvae release a thread of silk that binds the leaves together. I’m not making this up. And you know how many ants it takes to fill an apartment? Ten ants…tenants.
Proverbs 6 says, “Take a lesson from the ants, you lazybones.” And we sure can. The power of an ant colony is incredible. Workers are unwaveringly loyal to their queen. They die young, sacrificing unselfishly for the group. Ants are so united in purpose that scientists say an ant colony acts as a single organism. Together, these humble critters are the most prolific and successful animal on earth.
We have much to learn from these remarkable bugs. In 1 Corinthians 12:12, the Apostle Paul tells us that the church is one body, but it has many parts. Kinda like an ant colony. Paul continues, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:21-22, ESV). There’s no place for an independ-ant! The church is at its best when we love one another and work together towards a single purpose. So let’s move forward together and be a little more antlike.
Time for one more joke: What games do ants play with elephants? Squash.
