Bananas for Scale
Army Ant (Single Worker)

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Army Ant (Single Worker)

One soldier in a colony of millions that devours everything in its path/Insects & Arachnids

A single army ant (Eciton burchellii) worker is about 12 mm long and weighs roughly 10 mg. Individually unremarkable, army ants become devastating in colonies of up to 700,000 individuals that form coordinated raiding swarms up to 20 meters wide. They have no permanent nest; instead, the workers link their bodies together to form living structures called bivouacs. A colony can consume 100,000 prey items per day. The queen, at about 5 cm, is one of the largest ants in the world.

Measurements

Worker body length1.2 hundredths m
6.3 hundredthsNo. 2 pencils
1Skittle
14.1 millionGlucose molecules
Worker mass10 millionths kg
4 billionthsPickup trucks
55.6 billionthsMale gorillas
100 millionthsSlices of New York pizza
Queen body length5 hundredths m
8.2 hundredthsNightstand heights
5.6 tenthsFrench fry lengths
9.9 tenthsAA battery lengths
Swarm width20 m
1.4 thousandthsStrait of Gibraltar widths
38.5Human forearms
2Fire engine lengths
Colony size700,000 ants
22,581Baskin-Robbins flavors
7,955Piano keyboards
7Hairs on a head
Swarm advance rate6 thousandths m/s
2 thousandthsRunning toddlers
2.4 thousandthsJogging humans

About 20 m per hour

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