Do ants understand the basic principles of urban planning?

Welcome at ant-maps.com. This website shows you how wood ants build super-colonies of ant-hives. The image at your the right shows a population of these ants close to Winterswijk in the Netherlands. The nest are connected with paths or ant-roads. And amazingly the roads do all lead to the two largest nests in the center of the population. Are these two nests the capitals of this ant-land? Why are these nests connected to all other nests in this area? Do they trade goods? Why do wood ants build cities and road structures like we do? Are they that intelligent? And... do people and the ants follow the same basic principles for urban planning?

It took two days to get all the information to draw this map. And there were more questions than answers. To find answers to these questions I decided to look for more wood ant populations. And the hand- drawn maps from populations and notes piled up... and up. In February 2008 I decided to grab all this dusty paper together to put it all on proper digital maps and in a database. This website is an easy to use web-version of the database. First of all to make all the data easy to use for myself. But also to show other people how great these ant-worlds are.

When you are interested in the ant maps, then first take a look at the largest site in the database. It counts 320 locations of nests. Most of these nests disappeared over the last fifteen years. But many new nests were founded by wood ants too. You can also take a look at the list of sites. On this list you can click on the name of the site to get a full list of nests in this area with observations and photo's. Here you find information about the mapping methods, the database and this website.