What is it about?
Ant societies show remarkable diversity in their organization, from small colonies with a dozen workers and a single queen to large colonies with millions of workers and multiple queens. Yet, the role of the external environment that ants face in shaping these diverse societies remains unclear. To study this, we compiled a dataset characterizing ant social organization for 3,299 species and combined it with global climatic and ecological data. We detect strong global associations between climate, ecosystem type, and key features of social organization, suggesting that ecological context plays a major role in shaping how ant societies are organized across the globe.
Featured Image
Photo by piotr sawejko on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Ants are among the most ecologically dominant organisms on Earth, and their success is closely tied to their social organization. Understanding what influences the structure of these societies helps us understand how complex societies evolve and persist in different environments. What is unique about our study is its global scope: rather than focusing on individual species or isolated regions, we identify global-scale associations between environmental conditions and social organization across continents. Therefore, this work offers robust insights relevant not only to ants but to the broader study of how environments shape complex animal societies.
Perspectives
Working on this project has been very exciting! Ants are incredibly diverse, and assembling global data on their social organization was a challenging but rewarding process that deepened our knowledge of these amazing animals. What I find most fascinating is that patterns emerging at a global scale can reveal something meaningful about how complex societies interact with the environment. I hope this work encourages people to see ants not just as annoying small insects, but as sophisticated, highly diverse, and fascinating societies.
Eddie Pérochon
Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Environmental conditions shape the global distribution of ant societies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2530826123.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
