Ants and Rain?

Factual Questions
1

This story is inspired by my driveway. I have a lot of anthills in my driveway. And I can’t help but observe them and their lives.

Ants are very industrious. Forget bees. Did you know, after every rainstorm, after it dries, those little animals are back building their anthills?

Anyway, a couple of days ago, we had a particularly hard downpour. Now I know that the ants didn’t emerge from their nests during the storms.

How do ants survive a storm, especially a bad one? The nest clearly must be flooded. And I know their not aquatic animals. So how do they breathe in the water?

Thank you in advance for your kindly replies :slightly_smiling_face: .

2

(No mention if they all go marching down
to the ground
to get out
of the rain)

3

I can’t speak to how reliable this site is, but here are some ways ants deal with rain:

To sum up, ants have some methods to prevent being drowned out by rain. They can dig deep enough for water to not penetrate. They can make their tunnel systems complex and block off chambers that fill up with water, think of a bulkhead in a ship that keeps water from getting to the rest of the ship to sink it. Some ants will even block a hole at the surface (rocks, sticks, stones covering them) but since most anthills have multiple entrances that’s not always effective. Some ants just evacuate if they are in a shallow anthill that gets flooded. Some ants create specialized air chambers that they can shelter in. Some ants can even bail out the water through a weird process where they drink the water and pee it out (very strange in my opinion).

Anyway, there are a number of methods ants use. Obviously you have to figure they’ve come up with something since they’ve been around for millions of years and have had plenty of time to develop a
“business continuity plan” of sorts. :slight_smile:

4

I often notice an invasion of my kitchen during heavy rains.

5

Pulling an answer out of my ass, I’m imagining a tunnel shaped like a J. The top is the entrance at the surface and the end of the hook is where the ants shelter during flooding. When the rain stops they simply turn the J into a U.

6

Important section from that link:

With some clever tunneling, ants can trap air in various chambers throughout the nest, and entrances to chambers come from below, preventing water from coming in.

Of course the other elements from the link are important too, but water will seep through the soil past any blockages, but these air pockets are pretty stable. The air won’t rise up through the soil, the same way it won’t rise up through a fine mesh into an upside down glass of water.