Planet Ant

George McGavin

Life Inside the Colony

Ant Farm

We’re about to embark on an ambitious project. Something that’s never been tried before. It will show us a hidden world. I’m standing in the middle of something that you would never normally see. It’s taken six months from planning to this. a new home for 1 million of nature’s most extraordinary creatures. Ants.

They fascinate us. They build complex, organised societies. And we’ve always drawn parallels between their world and ours.

It’s basically an ant production line. So what can we learn from ants?

To find out, we’ve brought a working colony of leafcutter ants from the tropics of Central America. We’ve recreated their nest so that we can see inside. And for one month, we’re going to capture every aspect of their lives.

We’ll track them. “This is going to be great, because this is going to tell us what these soldiers are doing in the ground.”

We’ll listen to them. And get right up close to them. We’ll go beyond our own ant Metropolis to meet some of the most impressive ants on the planet.

And discover the surprising ways in which ants are helping us solve global problems. I’m an entomologist, and even to me, what ants can achieve is astonishing.

Our project will show their world as it’s never been seen before, and reveal what they can teach us about ourselves.