Why We Keep Ants

Nolan Webb:
I kept my first ant colony at the age of 8, some 15+ years ago, and have never looked back. Ants are the most fascinating, sophisticated, and organized creatures on this planet. It’s amazing keeping different species and seeing just how unique each one truly is. Learning about and observing their individual personalities never gets old.

I have also found it rewarding catching poorly-known species for the first time, learning how to rear them, and then growing those colonies to maturity alongside our community. It's incredibly fulfilling to take a species that was relegated to obscurity and bring them into the limelight.

Miles Maxcer:
I can remember finding my first queen ant like it was yesterday: a huge, black carpenter ant queen (Camponotus modoc) walked across our driveway in 2009, and I bolted to collect her. After my dad and I constructed a makeshift formicarium, she laid eggs and the rest was history. While the ant keeping hobby has dramatically changed in the past 16 years, the excitement I get from finding the first queen on a warm summer day has never faded.

Ant keeping has provided me with a sense of community, a focus for my curiosity, and an opportunity to make an impact and share the natural world’s beautiful complexity with others. My experience keeping ants has unlocked doors for my career across the disciplines of biology, science communication, and public policy, and enabled me to travel around the world.

To me, this hobby represents an opportunity to explore nature in a unique, accessible, and exhilarating way. Ants are fantastic ambassadors for the natural world and when we bring them into our homes, we have an opportunity to build a lifelong appreciation for animals not so unlike us. They provide us an unmatched analog for how social species can cooperate to do things that are bigger than themselves.