The marvels of nature are something to be amazed by on a constant basis. Take the 25-day time lapse of these ants digging in a giant ant farm, it’s something you really have watch to believe. In less than a month they can excavate and create spaces that are suitable for their purposes and then take them down to create new spaces that will be just as serviceable. They do more work in a day that most construction crews do in a week. It helps though that there’s so many of them and that for the most part they work tirelessly to create the spaces that are needed.
In essence ants are perhaps one of the most perfect creatures in existence. Just because they’re small doesn’t mean they need to be taken as weaker or inferior in any way. Look at the structures they create and the tasks they take on. Human beings and any other animal would no doubt balk at this kind of work as we’d need to rest and/or recuperate after even half a day of such hard labor. But ants keep going, they don’t stop until the job’s done and even then they keep going on a different job. There’s almost always something to do within a colony and there aren’t a lot of times when you’ll see a big number of ants just sitting around.
If they’re not building then they’re out foraging for food, or tending to the queen, or perhaps even defending the colony depending on the type of ant we’re talking about. They’re always doing something because the colony is the only thing that matters with many ants. Without the queen or the colony there’s not much left for an ant to live for since that happens to be their life from start to finish. That’s also why they’re able to create such complex tunnel systems as you see in the clip and some that are even more complex in nature. They devote every moment to either foraging for the colony or creating more and more space for the colony in order to keep it expanding and maintain it. Human beings do much the same thing in many regards but unlike ants we don’t tend to come together as a colony all that often unless there’s a serious need to do so.
One very important reason that ants are so important is that they are necessary for an ecosystem. They are scavengers and as such are known to remove dead material from forest floors for sustenance, and they also aerate the soil and further nurture the roots of many plant species. Ants also take seeds down into their tunnels to feast on and in the process new plants are allowed to grow. If not for ants a great deal of plant life on the planet would not exist as it does today. Despite being small and somewhat pesky at times ants are very important to the environment for the sole reason that while we can’t always see what they’re doing, we can see the result.
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