Animal · Germany, France, United Kingdom
Black garden ant
Lasius niger — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The black garden ant is one of the commonest insects in Europe, and a single nest can hold several thousand busy sisters. They all share one mother: the queen.
Picture credit: ImagePerson (CC BY 4.0) · Katja Schulz (CC BY 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the black garden ant live?
Home: in gardens, meadows and cracks in the pavement.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Spain.
The short profile
Fully grown: 3–5 mm (workers). It weighs about 0 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
Every nest begins with one young queen. On a warm, still summer day, winged ants from many nests rise into the air at once and mate high above the gardens. The queen then bites off her own wings, digs a small chamber in the soil and lays her first eggs there. For weeks she eats nothing and lives off her flight muscles, which she no longer needs, until the first workers hatch. After that her daughters do all the fetching, carrying and building, while she does almost nothing but lay eggs. Black garden ants also keep aphids rather like tiny cattle, guarding them in exchange for a sugary drink called honeydew. A queen can live for nearly thirty years, longer than any other insect that lives in a colony.
Find it on the globe
Black garden ant is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How big is a black garden ant?
A worker is only three to five millimetres long. The queen is much bigger, about eight or nine millimetres, roughly twice the length of her daughters.
Where do black garden ants build their nests?
Under paving slabs, flat stones and garden paths, or in bare earth in a lawn. The little crater of fine soil on the pavement is the material the ants have carried up from below.
Why do these ants look after aphids?
Aphids suck plant sap and give off a sugary drop called honeydew. The ants drink it and in return chase away ladybirds and other aphid hunters, so both sides gain something.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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