Acacia ant
The acacia ant is a tiny orange-brown ant with very big eyes. It lives inside the big hollow thorns of a tree called the bullhorn acacia. The tree gives the ants a home and food, and the ants guard the tree like tiny soldiers.
How big is it?
How long is it?
How big is Acacia ant compared to YOU?
Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
The ant queen chews a hole into a thorn and lays her first 15 to 20 eggs inside.
A colony can grow to more than 4,000 ants in three years.
Without its ants, the acacia gets eaten by insects and crowded out by other plants.
Most asked questions about Acacia ant
?Why do acacia ants live in trees?
The bullhorn acacia gives them a home in its hollow thorns and food, and the ants protect it.
?How big is an acacia ant?
About 3 millimetres long, smaller than a grain of rice.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Pseudomyrmex ferruginea
- Group
- Ants
- Family
- Formicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Formicidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Pseudomyrmex ferruginea (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by April Nobile. CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
Black garden ant
Bullet ant
Pharaoh ant
Argentine ant
Red imported fire ant
Yellow crazy ant
Hercules beetle
Emperor scorpion
Orchid mantis
Tsetse fly
Amazonian giant centipede
Black witch