Ants, Ants, and More Ants!

The weather is still dry, dry, dry with no rain in sight. Ants have been coming in and around my house since July. Why do they come into your house and mine? Is it just to annoy you and me? Well, actually, they march into our houses in search of water during the dry months of the summer and the early autumn.

Although ants are extremely annoying to humans, they are very necessary in this world. Ants are called decomposers. A decomposer is an organism that breaks down dead animals and dead plants into soil. Once again, ooooh, yuck! But what would be laying around all over the place if there were not ants? That's right, a bunch of dead animals and rotten plants would be all over your neighborhood. So, thank goodness for ants!

Three kinds of decomposers break down dead plants and animals. We will call them THE FIMs...Fungi, Insects, and Microorganisms. What are fungi? Well, you may like them on your pizza, or maybe in your bread, or in your cheese. Fungi are things like mushrooms, yeasts, and molds. What are insects? Insects are creatures, with three body parts: a head, a thorax, and an abdomen. They have six legs and usually have a hard "shell" on the outside of their bodies. What are microorganisms? These are organisms, like bacteria and protozoa, that can only be seen with a microscope.

So which FIM is an ant? A fungi, an insect, or a microorganism? If you said "insect," then you are correct! Do you have any idea how ants are able to follow each other over long distances? As they march along, they put a kind of perfume on the ground that only they can smell. Strangely enough, ants "smell" with their antennae. As long as they keep smelling the scent on the ground, they will follow it to a food source.

Not only do ants eat dead plants and animals, but ants get eaten by other animals. Other creatures like lizards, spiders, other insects, and even fish eat ants. Let's say that you had a HUGE scale to weigh animals. Pretend that you could weigh all the animals in one country all at once. Well, if all the animals together weighed 10,000 pounds, 1000 pounds of that would be ants! That's how important ants are in the animal kingdom. They get rid of dead organisms, provide food for other animals, and create soil for farmers. Three cheers for the extremely irritating, but very necessary ANT!

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