Ants are undoubtedly the best animal alive. There is at least 20 quadrillion on Earth. That is 20,000,000,000,000,000 ants on our planet. That’s about 2.5 million ants for every human being. What always shocked me is the correlation between ants and humans. They live in big societies and each has a specific job. Their lives are led by a distinct algorithm that creates collective intelligence.

Ants communicate through chemical signals like pheromones. They also use these pheromones to navigate their surroundings. The coolest thing about ants is they have found a way to live in populations with gigantic societies and still have minimal impact on their environment. They, by many objective measures, though, ants are far more consequential to life on Earth than we are. If people were to disappear, little about the world would change for the worse; if ants and other invertebrates did, nearly everything would suffer. Ants aerate the soil, transport seeds, and aid in decomposition; their mounds serve as dense nutrient oases that are a foundation for a wide range of life. They are the primary ecosystem engineers of almost every land ecosystem on earth. They cultivate crops of fungus for their own consumption and can also farm aphids that feed on the sap of plants. They are also very kind to each other and are always working as a full society to make sure everyone survives. It’s hard to believe that in a time of crisis, humans would act more morally than ants. Ants always put the success of the colony first. If humans could be a little more like ants, who knows how great our society could be?