When observing ants, it’s easy to see that it wouldn’t take much to change the population of ants in a colony with a can of Raid or the bottom of your foot. So which ants step up and take over duties of the ants you just killed? While we all know that ants have a reputation for being extremely hard workers, at any given time 1/3 of the ants in any given colony spend most of their time doing nothing but waiting to fill a vacate position. In fact, researchers found that approximately 40 per cent of the ants in a given study were totally inactive while their co-workers worked diligently to maintain the colony. The supposed lazy ants actually specialize in waiting to replace others, as some ants are food gathers, soldiers and built nests. These lazy ants once activated, increase their levels of movement to match those of the lost workers, and then the colony returned to normal business. It has been determined that young workers start out as the lazy ants, as they most vulnerable ants in the colony, until they need to fill someone else’s boots.
