How do ants breathe?

Ants, like all insects, do indeed breathe. Unlike vertebrates they do not

have lungs or an oxygen-carrying blood pigment (like the heme in hemoglobin for

us). Instead they rely on a system of tubes, called tracheae and tracheoles,

which carry atmospheric oxygen to the tissues and almost to the cellular level.

The outside openings of the tracheae are called spiracles. Gas exchange is

primarily by diffusion, although larger active insects my help this along by

contracting and expanding muscles around the tracheae in a process called

ventilation. Ants are small enough that they need only a few spiracles and do

not use ventilation. These openings usually have valves that allow the

spiracle to be open or closed. As noted earlier the blood does not transport

oxygen and is not red as it is in vertebrates.

Do Ants Breathe

Ants, like all insects, have respiratory organs derived from their external cover (the exoskeleton), called tracheae. They are ducts that extend inwards from the outer body surface and branch into smaller and smaller ramifications, until they reach the spaces between the cells in the body tissues. There, they deliver the oxygen and take the carbon dioxide, mainly by simple diffusion along concentration gradients.

If you look at an ant closely under a magnifying glass (or better still, a binocular microscope) you may be able to see small openings, especially in the abdomen, which represent the openings of the tracheae, called spiracles. There may be a pair of spiracles (and their corresponding tracheae) per body segment or less.

Check these pages to see both schematic illustrations and actual photographs of insect tracheae, and more information:

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP...

http://bio-ditrl.sunsite.ualberta.ca/detail/?P_MNO...

PS. Highlander has provided a good answer, which incidentally can be found here:

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/jul99/9319254...

So unless he's the author, that is plagiarism.

Ants breath through spiracle through which they take in oxygen which slowly and passively diffuses.

Ants are in and out of their nest with a few holes to let in air. So their environment has more oxygen. But beyond that I haven't seen any research on the topic to indicate much of a difference between them. a paper on least oxygen dependant insects by Andy Rasmussen

Every living creature breathes somehow, ants can survive so long with so little air in their enclosure not because they don't have lungs, but because they are so small and their lungs are even smaller, so they don't require much oxygen to survive. They still need it, but that little amount in the case will last them a long time. But yes, all insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, etc... breathe.

Not only ants, all the insects breathe thorough the SPIRACLES, a small hole on its body. If you observe the abdomen region of any insect, it has many segments. In between the segments, soft regions are visible. In this soft regions, so many SPIRACLES are existing. Through these spiracles only, the oxygen is taken in and carbondioxide is given off.

they have holes (a bit like pores) on their carapace to "breath", but the air flows naturally through them : they don't have to force the air to come in and out of "lungs" as we do. They don't even have lungs.

they breath through the spaces between there body segments.

they have noses to

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