Ants are some of the most fascinating creatures on the planet. Something like ten thousand trillion ants control vast stretches of territory. Their success lies in cooperation. They are a social insect, living in often enormous colonies, coordinating their activities to an exceptional degree to achieve domination. These are aggressive and capable critters, ones whose existence is characterized by continuous work and conflict. In many places they are the dominate insect, and usually displace solitary insects (those that live and forage alone and not in social groups) to less favorable habitat or eat them.

Ant society is a world of females. Colonies are dominated by the queen ant, and she controls the reproduction of her colony. The queen starts life as a winged creature, and along with winged male ants they leave an established colony to start a new population. They emerge from the next, often in vast swarms, and mate in midair. The females land, rip off their wings, and begin digging to establish a colony. The males simply die in heaps, after having lived a short but lets hope reproductive life. The queen then stores the sperm in a special bag near the abdomen, and uses this reproductive material for the rest of her life. All eggs that she fertilizes become female, and all the worker ants you see around an ant colony are females. Males are created when eggs are not fertilized, and only when they are needed to start a new colony. It hardly seems fair. The queen even chemically controls what kind of female ants - queens, workers, soldiers - will be created. She is an egg laying machine and it is the task of the rest of the colony to help her maximize her reproduction.

One of the most common desert ants are the harvesters. These ants construct often enormous craters, sometimes two feet or more in diameter. They are cold blooded creatures, emerging when temperatures go above 60 degrees and move back underground when they top 111 degrees. Harvester ants feed on seeds, which they gather in prodigious quantities. Workers from one nest may gather 7,000 seeds a day. In one experiment it was found that harvester ants found considerable seeds from a plant species that hadn't produced seed in over a year. They are hardy, and readily attack other ants who intrude in their realm. After a good summer rain, it is not uncommon to find heaps of these ants wings from a sudden massive spate of reproduction.

Species: Rough Harvester Ant
Latin Name: Pogonomyrmex rugosus
Habitat: Lowlands, especially disturbed and relatively bare areas, and sandy areas near roads
Range: Southwestern States