On a humid afternoon a few years ago in the Peruvian Amazon, a flicker of motion caught Phil Torres' eye. A cherry-spot metalmark butterfly (Adelotypa annulifera) was drinking nectar from the tips of bamboo shoots. As he watched, he realized something strange was going on. Normally butterflies only sip at nectar for a few seconds, minutes at most—but these butterflies were feeding for hours, Torres later discovered. Even more bizarre, ants that live on the bamboo and chase away other insects from their home ignored the butterflies.

For millions of Californians, Argentine ants can be the stuff of nightmares, but their persistent presence in Northern California homes is merely one symptom of a larger problem: These invasive ants are out-competing native ant species and, in doing so, fundamentally altering the state's ecosystems. By Laurel Hamers.

Instead of finding their own food and caring for their own young, some ants simply make other insects their slaves.

Fungus-farming ants seem to have selected for genome duplications in their crop, just like human farmers, allowing them to expand the size of their colonies. By Claire Asher.

It’s a nasty poison, but for an ant fighting off a dangerous fungus, it could be the only hope. For the first time, ants have been seen self-medicating – on food rich in hydrogen peroxide. Large, dense colonies of social insects like ants and bees can be particularly vulnerable to parasite infections and fungal diseases. One way to manage this might be to ingest otherwise harmful substances to fight the infections, but conclusive evidence of this behaviour in insects had been elusive.

AS IF YOU needed another reason to declare ants the most legit insects on Earth, take a look at the video above. Those are ants of the genus Leptogenys assaulting a millipede (a harmless consumer of rotten vegetation, as opposed to the venomous centipede, which is a carnivore). It starts out like you’d expect it to, with the millipede adopting a defensive posture as its enemies swarm around it. Suddenly, a sting (at about 1:00), and still more as the ants overwhelm their prey.

Ants are capable of remarkable feats of coordination. They can forge complex paths through the jungle, build sophisticated structures, and adapt foraging patterns to fit their environment, all without orders from a centralized source. Deborah Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University, hopes to uncover the simple rules that produce complex patterns from simple individual actions.

The biologist Deborah Gordon has uncovered how ant colonies search efficiently without central organization, an insight that might improve computer networks. Ants are capable of remarkable feats of coordination. They can forge complex paths through the jungle, build sophisticated structures, and adapt foraging patterns to fit their environment, all without orders from a centralized source.