All ant societies are composed entirely of females; males have only one purpose to fertilize the queen and then die. The queen which is a thousand times the body weight of the smallest worker is the only ant that is fertile. Every worker is her daughter. There can be hundreds of thousands of ants in a nest. The Ants of Indonesia can have trunk trails that lead from the nest to be as long as 300 feet. If one scales the trunk to the size of a minor worker it would be 30 miles long. The traffic often runs heavy and the number of ants can reach a thousand. There are traffic rules as well. Ants returning to the nest travel near the middle and outbound ants keep to the sides.
This trail is the passage through which all food travels to the nest. The path is constantly maintained and cleared of any debris such as leaves and twigs that may make it less passable. About half the diet is mostly seeds from vegetables.
There are more than 15,000 ant species and they employ a variety of strategies to search and appropriate food. The ants of Indonesia hunt in groups but the workers of other species hunt alone. The Asian jumping ant can make startling leaps and travel as far as a hundred feet from its nest.
These ants of Indonesia when working together are able to capture prey thousands of times their own weight. Victims include spiders, cockroaches, crickets, and scorpions. To bring down an earthworm of four inches it may require as much as a hundred workers.
