When we think of ants, we picture tireless workers: farmers tending fungi, soldiers defending colonies, scouts searching for food, or nurses caring for brood. But ants as weavers? That role belongs to one of the most remarkable ant species on Earth: Oecophylla smaragdina, also known as the Asian weaver ant or green tree ant.

Meet Oecophylla smaragdina

• Подсемейство: Formicinae
• Genus: Oecophylla

   

• Species: O. smaragdina (found in India, Southeast Asia, and northern Australia) and O. longinoda (found in Sub-Saharan Africa).

These arboreal ants thrive in forests and orchards, especially where tree canopies overlap. Unlike ground-dwelling species, they build their entire lives among the branches. And their homes are unlike any others: vast silk-bound nests made of leaves, strung together with the help of their own larvae.

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Weaver ants don’t spin silk themselves. Instead, they enlist their larvae as living spools. Workers gently hold a larva in their mandibles, stimulating it with antennae until it secretes silk. This silk binds leaves together, forming chambers, tunnels, and walls.

The construction process is a feat of cooperation. Some workers bend leaves into position, while others link their bodies into chains and ladders to bridge gaps. Once everything is aligned, the “living silk machines” are brought in to stitch the structure.

The result? Expansive colonies that can stretch across more than 20 trees and cover up to 1,500 square meters. With hundreds of interconnected nests and sometimes multiple queens (a condition called polygyny), Oecophylla colonies can endure for decades.

One striking thing noted in observations and video documentaries such as the AntsDocumentary channel is how silent these ants are when walking over leaves and silk. Despite all the activity of weaving, climbing, transporting, they leave almost no audible footfalls.

Why might this be?

• Walking on silk and on leaves is different from walking on soil, twigs, or rough surfaces. These surfaces are softer or more flexible and may dampen noise.
• Their tarsi (the “feet” segments) are adapted to grip and move delicately over these surfaces, likely minimizing sound.

Being quiet may offer survival advantages: less detectable by predators, and perhaps less likely to disturb other species whose presence could be harmful (or that they might prey upon).

Сайтът AntsDocumentary video (see AntsDocumentary, “Oecophylla smaragdina behavior”) draws attention to this near silence as part of the ants’ arboreal lifestyle, emphasizing how the forest-canopy weavers move with stealth as much as strength.

A closer look inside reveals a complex society:

• Nurses care for the developing brood (eggs, larvae, and pupae) shielding the next generation.
• Работници forage, defend, and maintain the nest. Their social stomach, called the култура, allows them to share food through трофалаксис, a form of mouth-to-mouth feeding that ensures everyone is nourished, even those who never leave the nest.
• Scouts and soldiers patrol the canopy, guarding the colony and leading hunting parties.

An interesting point: like humans, weaver ants are among the rare species that actively reshape their environment, adapting tree branches into an engineered home.

Coordination on this scale requires more than pheromone trails. Oecophylla smaragdina relies on multimodal communication:

• Chemicals: pheromones for trail marking, recruitment, and alarm.
• Touch: antennae to guide and stimulate nestmates.

Vibrations and stridulation: substrate-borne signals that can be tuned for alarm, recruitment, or close-quarters coordination.

These vibrational cues supplement chemical signals, providing faster or more localized information when needed. In noisy and windy canopies, pheromone plumes would be unreliable. Multimodal signaling explains how colonies can still coordinate complex tasks such as nest construction, cooperative hunting, or ambushes. This flexibility in communication channels may be a key factor behind their ecological success.

Weaver ants are omnivores, collecting both sugary substances (like nectar and honeydew from sap-feeding insects) and protein from animal prey.

They are formidable hunters:

• A single worker may stumble upon a struggling insect and quickly summon reinforcements with pheromone trails.
• Together, they immobilize prey and haul it back, sometimes lifting loads 60 times their body weight.

Their coordinated efforts ensure that even large crickets, flies, or worms make their way into the nest, often to be served as larval meals.

This efficiency has caught human attention too—Oecophylla smaragdina is sometimes used as a natural form of pest control in orchards, reducing the need for chemical pesticides.

The queen, far larger than her workers, is central to the colony’s survival. When it’s time to establish a new nest, she doesn’t travel alone. Fifteen to twenty workers escort her, acting as both porters and bodyguards. Scouts clear the way, checking for threats, while her entourage carefully maneuvers her massive body into the new silk fortress.

Once inside, the colony resumes its rhythm: workers weaving, nurses tending, scouts hunting. Meanwhile, the queen continues her lifelong duty of laying eggs.

Even after a colony dies, its architecture lingers. The woven leaves eventually wither, but the silk holds strong, leaving ghostly remnants of once-thriving nests. These structures are a testament to the ingenuity of weaver ants, whose silk-spun homes are among the most durable and beautiful achievements in the insect world.

From farming fungi to weaving silk, ants never fail to amaze us with their creativity. Oecophylla smaragdina shows us that evolution can turn even larvae into construction tools, producing some of the most impressive cooperative architecture found in nature.

Their silence as they move high in the canopy is just one more adaptation ; paired with their ability to combine chemical, tactile, and vibrational signals into a robust communication system. High in the trees, hidden in woven leaves, live the green tree ants.