"In America there are large ants which can eat whole trees bare as a broom handle in a single night,"she wrote in the description.

But in the same drawing, she incorrectly lumped together army and leaf-cutter ants.

In the same plate, Merian depicted and described leaf-cutter ants for the first time.

Merian was correct about the giant bird-eating spiders, ants building bridges with their bodies and other details.

The image which also contained novel descriptions of ants, fascinated a European audience that was more concerned with the exotic story unfolding before them than the gender of the person who painted it.

Ants can use pheromones for communication.

For animals their size, ants have been astonishingly successful, largely due to their wonderful social behavior.

In fact, when it comes to the art of war, ants have no equal.

Such is their devotion to the common good of the colony that not only soldier ants but also worker ants will sacrifice their lives to help defeat an enemy.

There are an extremely large number of ants worldwide.

We can learn from the passage that ants are not found around the poles.

Where we use sound and sight to communicate, ants depend primarily on pheromone, chemicals sent out by individuals and smelled or tasted by fellow members of their colony.

Ants keep predatory insects away from where their aphids feed; Gmail keeps the spammers out of our inboxes.

Just as some ants farm the bugs called aphids for the honeydew they produce when they feed, so Google farms us for the data that our digital lives yield.