Long-spined acorn ant
Temnothorax longispinosus
The long-spined acorn ant is a tiny ant from the forests of North America. It has little spines on its back near its waist. It makes its home in small ready-made hidey-holes among the fallen leaves.
Lives in
Eastern USA and Canada, and British Columbia, in forests
Length
2 to 2.5 mm (0.08 to 0.1 in)
What does it eat?
Like most small ants, it eats tiny insects and sweet things it finds. Workers carry food home to share with the nest.
How big is it?
How long is it?
🍚2.5 of them in a row are as long as one grain of rice🍽️could run across a dinner table in 17 seconds⚡moves 23 times its own body length every second
How big is Long-spined acorn ant compared to YOU?
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How fast is it?
A garden snail about 0.05 km/h (0.03 mph)
Long-spined acorn ant about 0.21 km/h (0.13 mph)
A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
A person walking about 5 km/h (3.1 mph)
cool stuff
Fun facts
1
It is only 2 to 2.5 millimetres long, smaller than a grain of rice.
2
It does not dig a big nest. It moves into little spaces that are already there in the leaves on the forest floor.
3
Where it nests changes with the seasons of the year.
you asked
Most asked questions about Long-spined acorn ant
?How big is the long-spined acorn ant?
Very small, only about 2 to 2.5 millimetres long.
?Where does the long-spined acorn ant live?
In forests of the eastern United States and Canada, and in British Columbia.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Temnothorax longispinosus
- Group
- Ants
- Family
- Formicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Formicidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Temnothorax longispinosus (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 Dominique Monie. CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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