Animal profile

Weaver Ant

Oecophylla smaragdina

InsectaTree canopies in tropical forest, plantations and orchards

Field profile

Weaver ants are arboreal ants that build nests by binding living leaves together. Colonies span many trees and can contain hundreds of thousands of workers. They are aggressive territorial predators and have been used in orchards for pest control for well over a thousand years.

Published field notes

2024-04-24

Weaver Ant

Weaver ants use their larvae as glue guns

Adult workers cannot produce silk. To sew a nest they hold a mature larva in their mandibles and move it back and forth across the leaf edges, squeezing out silk that adult ants cannot make themselves.

Read with evidence →