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Asian Weaver Ants (Moot Dang) - Klaeng, Thailand 2012

479 views · Published 31 December 2012 · 1:34 · Indexed 3 October 2026

Channel: tsbrownie · 2012 · Pets & Animals

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Video of big red Asian Weaver Ants (moot dang) in Klaeng, Thailand.  (Sorry about the poor audio, it's either background noise or my finger over the mic or both.)  
These ants are extremely defensive and will turn towards (and stream on to) anything that bothers them.  They can really bite.  The nest is typically a round ball built in trees from leaves and silk threads the ants produce.  The Thais will boil the nest and eat the eggs (no wonder the ants are so quick to bite.)


From Wikipedia:
Weaver ants or green ants (genus Oecophylla) are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae (order Hymenoptera). Weaver ants live in trees (they are obligately arboreal) and are known for their unique nest building behaviour where workers construct nests by weaving together leaves using larval silk.[3] Colonies can be extremely large consisting of more than a hundred nests spanning numerous trees and containing more than half a million workers. Like many other ant species, weaver ants prey on small insects and supplement their diet with carbohydrate-rich honeydew excreted by small insects (Hemiptera). Weaver ant workers exhibit a clear bimodal size distribution, with almost no overlap between the size of the minor and major workers.[4][5] The major workers are approximately 8–10 mm (0.31–0.39 in) in length and the minors approximately half the length of the majors. Major workers forage, defend, maintain, and expand the colony whereas minor workers tend to stay within the nests where they care for the brood and 'milk' scale insects in or close to the nests.
Dead weaver ant queen carried by a worker ant

Weaver ants vary in color from reddish to yellowish brown dependent on the species. Oecophylla smaragdina found in Australia often have bright green gasters. Weaver ants are highly territorial and workers aggressively defend their territories against intruders. Because they prey on insects harmful to their host trees, weaver ants are sometime used by indigenous farmers, particularly in southeast Asia, as natural biocontrol agents against agricultural pests. Although weaver ants lack a functional sting they can inflict painful bites and often spray formic acid[6][7] directly at the bite wound resulting in intense discomfort.

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