Do ants sleep?

This was the question posed to me by my 5 year old as he sat on the patio, playing with a tube of Venom’s ooze we had purchased at Target a couple of hours earlier. Do ants sleep? I didn’t know the answer so I went and looked it up on the internet. Well, what do you think? My gut reaction was that ants do NOT sleep. They’re just busy little workers who always keep moving but apparently that is not correct. There is research that suggests that ants do in fact sleep. Some sleep for 7 hours a day. Even more interesting is that the ants somehow stagger the sleep/wake cycles so they’re not all asleep at the same time. Well, Ryan found this all very fascinating. We had quite the discussion about it and I was pretty amazed at yet another example of unschooling at work.

After this foray into the world of animal science, Iain came outside and was immediately grossed out by the site of the ooze. It is pretty nasty stuff, but once Iain saw the camera in my hand he really started hamming it up. In the end, Ryan got in on the act, too. This was such a good day!