Army Ant

• GeneralIt builds no anthill: the workers link their bodies into a living nest called a bivouac.
• comportamientoIt builds no permanent nest: its colonies are nomadic, and the workers link their own bodies into temporary structures (a bivouac) to shelter the queen and the larvae.
• Its hunting swarm advances in a fan across the forest floor, up to twenty metres wide, and takes every arthropod and small vertebrate that fails to escape.
• Dozens of bird species, the so-called ant-followers, make a living by accompanying these columns and catching the insects fleeing the swarm, and some depend on them entirely.
• The workers bridge gaps in the ground with their own bodies and adjust the shape of the bridge to minimise the number of ants tied up in it.
• It is the only Eciton species that hunts in swarms: a fan-shaped front more than fifteen metres wide, instead of the narrow columns of the rest.
• It builds no nest: hundreds of thousands of workers link together to form a living bivouac, among buttress roots or up to twenty metres above the ground in the trees.
• It alternates phases: some twenty nomadic days, during which it shifts bivouac almost every night, and a statary phase in which the queen lays between 100,000 and 300,000 eggs.
• It is a keystone species of the tropical forest: more than three hundred species depend on its columns, among them the antbirds, which hunt the arthropods fleeing the swarm.
• The workers are polymorphic, from 3 to 12 mm, with a soldier caste bearing long sickle-shaped mandibles.

Habitat & environment

The floor of tropical rainforest

Sources consulted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eciton_burchellii