January 5, 2026
Tinier shells, bigger armies
The meek did inherit the Earth, at least among ants
Ants skimped on armor, built mega-colonies — commenters: “Meek? They’re warlords”
TLDR: Scientists found ants grow huge colonies by making cheaper workers with thinner outer shells. Commenters dunked on calling ants “meek,” sparked an ethics spat over evolution, and joked it’s the startup model — proving nature’s quality-vs-quantity trade-off shapes ecosystems and internet arguments alike.
A new study says ants conquered the world by going quantity-over-quality: thinner outer shells (their “armor”) make each worker cheaper to build, so colonies get massive and rapidly spread. Cue the internet piling on. One commenter brought receipts with the Science Advances paper, while another dropped a controversial hot take about humans “undoing natural selection,” igniting a moral and science debate that escalated fast. Ethics committee, aisle three!
The title calling ants “meek” got roasted. The crowd shouted that ants are tiny war machines, linking to war in ants and reminding everyone that these sugar-loving gardeners also run battlefield operations. Meanwhile, the nerdy bits got meme-ified: nitrogen is pricey, armor is expensive, so some species choose thinner shells and bigger squads. Commenters joked it’s the “startup playbook” — cut perks, hire more, scale empire. One quipped: “HR says no raises, but great news: millions of new coworkers!”
Amid the drama, folks loved the clever method: computer vision on CT scans to measure 880 specimens across 507 species — not scissors and microscopes this time. The more the team looked, the clearer the trade-off: hotter climates often mean thicker shells, hunters and fungus-farmers still scale big with thinner armor, and the “cheap worker” strategy helps ants diversify into new habitats. Meek? The internet says: more like micro-Mongols.
Key Points
- •Researchers found a strong correlation between thinner ant cuticles and larger colony sizes across 507 species.
- •Cuticle production requires nitrogen, making thicker cuticles costlier per worker; thinner cuticles reduce per-worker investment.
- •Automated CT scan analysis with computer vision yielded 880 measurements in about a week using the Antscan database.
- •Environmental and dietary factors influence cuticle thickness (hot climates, hunting/fungus-farming thicker), but the colony size–thin cuticle link persists.
- •Ant groups with thinner cuticles show greater diversification and adaptability, reinforcing ants’ role as ecological engineers.