How does an ant drink water (magnifying glass)

How does an ant drink water (magnifying glass)

I thought this question about how ants drink was really cool. It’s a question that has a pretty simple answer at first, but it also gets a lot more complicated when you delve into the details of how insects uptake fluid.

Ants, which are social wasps in the family Formicidae, are an insanely diverse family of insects. There’s over 12,000 species of ants currently described, and there could be as many as 20,000. To give you an idea of how this compares to mammals, there’s only about 40 species of dog living today.

So there’s a lot of ants, which have many different lifestyles. However, there’s only so many ways to collect fluid…and different tactics mean that they each drink a certain amount.

First, though, we need to explore how insect mouths work because drinking is a really complicated process for insects.

How do insects drink?
Like people, insects use their mouths to drink. They can do so in some pretty different ways, but they use the same piece of equipment to do this.