Living The Quran
From Issue: 486 [Read full issue]
Al-Naml (The Ants)
Chapter 27: Verse 18
Communication
Then, when they reached the valley of the ants, an ant said, 'Ants! Enter your dwellings so that Sulayman and his troops do not crush you unwittingly.'
The Quran supplies an interesting piece of information when talking about Prophet Sulayman's (peace be upon him) armies and mentions that there is an advanced "communications system" among the ants.
The scientific research made on ants in this century has shown that there is an incredible communications network among these creatures. In an article published in the National Geographic magazine, this point is explained:
Huge and tiny, an ant carries in her head multiple sensory organs to pick up chemical and visual signals vital to colonies that may contain a million or more workers, all of which are female. The brain contains half a million nerve cells; eyes are compound; antennae act as nose and fingertips. Projections below the mouth sense taste; hairs respond to touch.
Even if we do not notice it, the ants have quite a different method of communication in virtue of their sensitive sensing organs. They employ these sense organs at every moment of their lives, from finding their prey to following each other, from building their nests to fighting. They have a communication system which astonishes us, as human beings with intellect, with their 500,000 nerve cells squeezed into their bodies of 2 or 3 millimetres. What we should keep in mind here is that the half a million nerve cells and the complex communication system mentioned above belongs to an ant which in bulk is almost one millionth of a human being.
The ants, who constitute an orderly social structure with these various responses, lead a life based on mutual news exchange and they have no difficulty in achieving this correspondence. We could say that ants, with their impressive communication system, are hundred percent successful on subjects that human beings sometimes cannot resolve nor agree upon by talking (e.g. meeting, sharing, cleaning, defence, etc.)
Source:
"The Miracle in The Ant" - Harun Yahya, Chapter 2