What Does “An Army of Ants” Mean?
“Army” is the term most commonly reached for when describing ants, and it captures something genuinely accurate about how they operate: coordinated, single-minded, and overwhelming in numbers. The name applies to ordinary foraging colonies, but it fits army ants (subfamily Dorylinae) most literally of all — these ants have no permanent nest, instead marching in massive columns of hundreds of thousands, raiding as they go and forming temporary bivouacs from their own linked bodies each night.
Even outside true army ant species, the term holds up well. Ant colonies function through rigid division of labor and near-total cooperation toward the colony’s survival, a level of coordination that looks, from the outside, remarkably like a marching military unit.
Example: “An army of ants stripped the fallen fruit bare within the hour.”
Related: Collective Nouns for Insects · What Is a Group of Ants Called? · A Colony of Ants · A Nest of Ants · A Swarm of Ants · A Bike of Ants