The Saharan silver ant can scurry across the hot sands of northern Africa at blistering speeds, surpassing three feet in a second. Relative to body size, that would be like a human dashing more than two football fields in the time it takes you to say, “That’s fast.” 

The giant turtle ant, Cephalotes atratus, is sometimes called “the Darth Vader of the ant world.” With a large, flattened head and sleek body, it can glide between the treetops of South American forests. And then there’s the leaf-cutter ant: some of them have an exoskeleton coated in rock and farm fungus underground with bits of chewed up plants, developing agriculture millions of years before humans even existed. 

Eduard Florin Niga recently