Ants | Costa Rica 2026

Costa Rica is home to more than nine hundred species of ants.

It is the sort of number that resists comprehension. We are accustomed to noticing birds because they move through the air, or mammals because they resemble us in familiar ways. Ants ask for something different. They ask us to lower our gaze and surrender the idea that significance is measured by size.

Once we began looking, we found them almost everywhere.

They crossed hiking trails in purposeful columns. They disappeared beneath rotting logs and emerged again at the roots of immense trees. They moved through gardens with the same quiet determination they showed in untouched rainforest. Even the edges of parking lots, places we tend to think of as belonging only to ourselves, held thriving societies going about lives that had begun long before the pavement arrived.

Every habitat seemed to contain its own conversations.

The leafcutter ants were perhaps the easiest to admire. Long files of workers carried fragments of greens and petals many times the size of their own bodies, each piece destined not to be eaten directly but to nourish a fungus cultivated deep below the forest floor. What appeared at first to be simple labor revealed itself as agriculture—an ancient partnership perfected millions of years before our own species imagined farming.

The army ants announced themselves differently in the darkness of the forest. Their columns flowed across the forest floor like a living current, thousands upon thousands of individuals advancing with a collective purpose that seemed less like movement than weather. We didn't get to witness any antbird activities that typically follow army ants trails, probably another reason for us to keep looking for them.

Then there were the bullet ants. Large, deliberate, almost unhurried, they carried with them a reputation earned through one of the most painful stings in the natural world. Yet what remained with us was not apprehension but respect. They were simply inhabitants of the same forest, fulfilling a life that had no need of our approval or fear.

We also found acacia ants in the urban structures, fire ants in sunlit clearings, and the restless movements of crazy ants weaving through the leaf litter. Each species occupied a different place in the intricate ecosystem, each solving the problem of existence in its own way.

It became clear, before long, that the forest and the ecosystem is not merely inhabited by ants. In many ways, it is organized by them. They move soil, disperse seeds, prune vegetation, recycle the dead, cultivate fungi, protect plants, and become food for countless other lives. To walk through a Costa Rican forest and trails without noticing ants is to overlook one of its principal architects.

All they ask of us is that we slow down enough to see them.