Happy Earth Day, friends. I hope you make some time today to get outside and celebrate our amazing Earth.
I have been spending a lot of time creating some children’s nature games that I expect to launch on Etsy in the very near future but when I looked at my calendar this week and realized Earth Day was approaching, I felt I needed to pause that and take a minute to acknowledge this celebration of Mother Earth.
I was stumped for a while, trying to imagine what to write. In the past I have written posts like 25 things you can do to make everyday Earth Day, or 5 ways to help our planet. I thought of all the things on this Earth that make me smile or bring me joy but WOW! That was a bit overwhelming giving the sheer length that would have had to be! No one has time for that.
In the end, I thought, let me pick one creature that amazes me with its unique adaptations. But again, as I began considering this– bats, hummingbirds, praying mantids, wolves, etc, it quickly became obvious just about every creature fascinates and interests me.
So I’m choosing ants– a creature we’ve all seen and heard of and likely have varying opinions of. But even if you dislike ants (like when you’re having a picnic and they show up uninvited) I bet you can appreciate some of their amazing adaptations and marvel at their ability to function smoothly as a society with many, many moving parts. The average ant colony contains thousands of individuals, though there are some super colonies that contain more than 300 million individuals. That’s MILLION with a capital M. Except for humans, ants have the largest and most complex societies of any animal on Planet Earth. Did you know some ants are farmers? Some farm fungus others farm aphids. Ants will even move the aphids if a storm is coming to protect them from pounding rains. Scientists say for every person on Earth, there are 1.5 million ants!! Talk about a successful group of animals.
Years ago, back in the days when it was safe to travel, I spent some time in Panama, studying bats among other things. During the day while the bats were sleeping, hiking was on the agenda. It’s difficult to go far there without crossing paths with leaf-cutter ants. There are more than 40 different species of leaf-cutter ants, but all are endemic to South and Central America. It’s a pretty impressive sight to be walking along, look down, and see a long line of moving leaves and flowers, being hoisted from below by ants. Some of these leaf-cutting colonies have more than 10 million individuals! And many consist of thousands of chambers.
Check them out here in this short video. I bet it will leave you shaking your head, and also happy that you weren’t born an ant! What a lot of work. It’s tiring just watching.
So do you want to try a Can You Spot the Lie, with ants? Let’s do it! See if you can pick out the one lie among two truths:
- Ants have two stomachs and no ears.
- Ants don’t fly (those are termites.)
- Ants live longer than any other insect.
Do you have your answer? Can you spot the lie? Click here to see if your guess is correct! Then, have a good Earth Day. It may be a little cold, but even so, it’s spring and a lot is happening out there, ready for you to witness.
They do fly
Yes, we learn something new everyday