Ants never sleep in the traditional sense, instead opting to take hundreds of tiny, one-minute micro-naps throughout the course of a twenty-four-hour period.

A closer look

Ants never sleep in the traditional sense, instead opting to take hundreds of tiny, one-minute micro-naps throughout the course of a twenty-four-hour period. This bizarre rest cycle ensures that at any given moment, the vast majority of the colony is awake, active, and endlessly toiling away at expanding their subterranean empires. The queen, however, gets to sleep for up to nine hours a day, living for years while her chronically sleep-deprived worker subjects literally work themselves to death in a matter of months. If you ever needed a microscopic representation of relentless corporate exploitation, look no further than an anthill, where the biological urge to unionize has been completely bred out in favor of non-stop, exhausting productivity