Red Carpenter Ants Fighting

Anthill Art 2017-05-12

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I came across a swarm of these red carpenter ants one day. There were probably a couple of dozen of them frantically running around in a small area. I noticed that a few of them were fighting, so I ran and grabbed my camera. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on while I was filming it. When I watched the video on my computer, I was blown away by what I had filmed.

After I started filming, the ants fought like this for at least 30 minutes. I had to leave off a good bit of footage because it was getting too dark, and I lost track of the ants when I ran and grabbed a light and a new camera battery.

All of the ants were attacking a single ant. The ant being attacked is from the same species (camponotus chromaiodes), and presumably from the same colony, so I have no idea why they were attacking him.

The fight got pretty brutal. While I was clipping it together and watching the scenes several times, I noticed a lot of crazy stuff happening which may not be obvious on the first watch. I may come back and annotate the video if enough people are interested.

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