Green tree ant
The green tree ant is an orange ant that lives high up in the trees. It builds its home by sewing leaves together. The workers hold the leaves in place, and then use their own babies like tiny glue guns, because the larvae can spin sticky silk.
How big is it?
How long is it?
How big is Green tree ant compared to YOU?
Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
To pull far-apart leaves together, the ants make living chains by climbing onto each other's backs.
One colony can have up to half a million ants and only one queen.
A single colony once lived in 151 nests spread over 12 trees.
The queen is greenish brown, which is where its scientific name smaragdina, meaning emerald, comes from.
Some jumping spiders pretend to be green tree ants so they can sneak into the nest.
Most asked questions about Green tree ant
?How do weaver ants build their nests?
Teams of ants pull leaves together, and other workers hold their larvae against the edges so the silk glues the leaves into a nest.
?How big is a green tree ant?
Workers are about 5 to 10 millimetres long. The queen is much bigger, about 2 to 2.5 centimetres.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Oecophylla smaragdina
- Group
- Ants
- Family
- Formicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Formicidae
- Lives on
- Asia, Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Weaver ant, Asian weaver ant, Green ant, Orange gaster
Where the facts come from
- Oecophylla smaragdina (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 Tuan Cao ( en:User:Tuancao1 ). CC BY-SA 3.0, 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
Brazilian whiteknee tarantula
Togo starburst baboon spider
Giant cicada
Black dwarf honey bee
Mayan stingless bee
Five-horned rhinoceros beetle