Bug card No. 1369 of 1,500

Tropical fire ant

Solenopsis geminata

The tropical fire ant is a small reddish ant that lives in big busy groups. It builds dirt mounds with lots of doors in sunny open places.

Lives in

First the Americas, now warm places all around the world

Top speed

about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)

On foot, estimate

Can it hurt you?

Dangerous: look, do not touch

What does it eat?

Fire ants eat many kinds of food, like small insects and seeds, and carry it back home to share.

A garden snail about 0.05 km/h (0.03 mph)

A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)

Tropical fire ant about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)

A person walking about 5 km/h (3.1 mph)

cool stuff

Fun facts

A fire ant nest can be as wide as a big step and have up to 20 doors.

Some nests have one queen, others have many queens living together.

When their home floods, fire ants can float on the water together.

People have carried it by accident to warm countries all over the world.

In new places it can build more than a thousand mounds on a field the size of a football pitch.

you asked

?Where does the tropical fire ant come from?

It comes from North, Central and South America and has spread to warm places around the world.

Solenopsis geminata (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.