What would my life be like if I were an ant?

Ants are small creatures, ranging in size from 0.75 to 52 millimetres, and the biggest being 60 millimetres. However, despite their tiny size, ants can lift up to 10 or 50 times its body weight and can run 300 metres an hour. So, what would my life be like if I were one of these remarkably small but strong gifts of nature?

First of all, we'll need to talk about how the world looks from an ant's point of view. The eyes of an ant are made up of facets called ommatidia (plural of ommatidium). These ommatidia see a single point in space so the eye sees one image, but different parts of it. How blurry the world looks to an ant depends on the size and diameter of the ommatidia, since they can't see the world at the same resolution as ours. The size and diameter of an ommatidium also depends on the ant's size, i.e. the smaller the ant, the less ommatidia, thus the world looks more blurry.

Whew, that was a lot to write... Aaaanyway, let's get on to the actual post, shall we?

In this post, I'll be a... leafcutter ant! Leafcutter ants are quite small, meaning that the world is pretty blurry to them...

It's a lovely day. Or at least, it seems to be. My eyes make things too blurry for me to actually see the world properly. The queen has just laid more eggs. I, along with other worker ants, bring the larvae to the nursery to be cared for whilst another caste of worker ants is enlarging the colony. It's past sunset now, a good time to look for food. I leave the other worker ants to find food to bring to the queen. Using my olfactory receptors, which are small bristles on my body, I manage to smell out some food. I approach it, a blurred shape in the middle of a blurred terrain.

After picking up a sample of it, I follow the trail of pheromones I left behind to find my way back, my antennae to the ground so I can pick up the pheromones' smell. Arriving at the nest, busy as always, I share the food with my other colleagues through a process called trophallaxis, which nourishes them as well as passing on information about the food's location. A scout leads the rest of the ants to the food while I go feed the solids of my sample to the larvae.

This is basically how my life goes on, up until the Reproductive Stage. Then, the queen will give birth to new queens and males to mate with them. We'll have to care for these new queens until they're old enough to fly away and start their own colony, or to take over this colony.

But until then... My life stays this way.

I'm sorry if there are some inaccurate details - this is based mostly on my general knowledge and research on the life of ants in their colonies.

Now, I've told you what my life would be like if I were an ant. Here comes the big question for you:

What would your life be like if you were an ant?

Take your time to think about it...

Note: I know that this post is kind of a ramble, because to be honest, I had no idea on what to write. I've been working on a story, so I might post it here as a WIP. Lots of WIPs to come, I'm figuring. I know my mom's gonna read my blog, sorry My-Yee! Writer's block has me now - getting my mojo back...

XOXO

Aedlycia