AMAZING ANTS

INTRODUCTION
"Then, when they reached the valley of the ants, an ant said,'Ants! Enter your dwellings so that Sulayman and his troops do not crush you unwittingly.(Surat an-Naml: 18)"

Harun Yahya, Miracle in The Ant:
Ants accomplish extraordinary tasks, which even human beings would have difficulty in doing.
The "wisdom" displayed by these tiny creatures proves that they are created and assigned to
carry out their specific tasks by the Creator, Who rules over all of nature. Read, watch or listen to Miracle in the Ant, discuss and take notes. Older children may be able to take their own notes.

Use these notes throughout the rest of the unit to refer back to.

Ant Architecture
Discuss different places ants are found. Go for a walk outside and see different places ants have built homes eg.trees, dirt, walls, etc. Discuss different materials they have used. What other places could ants build homes? What other materials could they use?

Extension Activities
Art: Nest Blueprints
Have students paint or draw a side view of an underground ant nest. Using fingerprints of washable paint, have students add ants to the tunnels: three connected fingerprints make an ant body, and a few quick pen strokes make the legs and antennae. (Use big thumbprints for that queen ant!) Make sure their drawings depict ants in different stages of development, with ants doing different jobs.

Ant Trails
Watch the ants movement. Do they seem to follow each other? Why? What benefits would following each other have? Test: Place a small piece of paper over an existing ant trail. let ants relearn the trail
over the paper, and then rotate the paper. What happens to the trail? What do the ants do? Rotate the paper back. What do the ants do?

Explain: It turns out that when ants find food, they secrete an invisible chemical called "trail pheromone" as they return to the nest. This trail leads directly from the nest to the food source. Other worker ants then follow the trail right to the food. Each worker then reinforces the trail on the way back. When all the food is gone, the workers no longer secrete trail pheromone and eventually the trail fades away. Extension Activities Younger students-

• Let them make their own trails using bits of paper or string for others to follow
• Play "follow the leader"
Older Students-
• Research other types of "pheremones", discuss how other insects or animals might
use pheremones (eg. Alarm pheremones, sex pheremones, primer pheremones and
aggregation pheremones.
• Research and write a report about "How Insects Communicate".

Ant Jobs
Different ants have different jobs
Are some jobs more inportant to others? What would happen if one group of ants stopped
doing their jobs? How would it effect the colony as a whole?
Different people have different jobs too. List some different jobs you can think of. Are some
jobs more important than others? . Discuss what would happen people stopped doing their
jobs.

Strength Of Ants
While watching ants coming and going from an outdoor ant nest, observe the size of food
that foraging ants bring back to the colony. How many times their size can they carry?
Discuss ways to determine a ratio of food size to ants. Compare their strength to that of a
human being: we can pull about 60% of our weight, but ants can pull 50 times their weight.
Look up facts about human strength in The Guinness Book of World Records.

Resources : Amazing Ant, Harun Yahya