Do ants sleep? Some insects spend the winter in a torpid state, and at least some insects - including some ants - exhibit sleep-like behaviour day to day.
Workers of a nocturnal Australian carpenter ant species, camponotus perthiana, were observed lying on their sides in the pupal position during the day.
The ants could be 'wakened' by gentle probing with forceps, and they moved around sluggishly before starting the typical swift movements of a worker ant.
However, they may not have been sleeping but just lying down on the job. At any given moment, only a very small fraction of the workers in the typical ant colony are at work foraging.
Inside the nest, most of the workers are standing still, grooming themselves or just walking around. Researchers suggest that some of the idle ants are either excess workers awaiting new jobs or reserve forces, available for a nest-wide crisis such as a flood or an invasion or just a heavy workload.
How much fuel does the space shuttle use for takeoff? At liftoff, the shuttle, with all its fuel, weighs more than 2,000 tonnes. In the first two minutes of liftoff, each of its two solid-fuel rocket boosters uses 499 tonnes of fuel. The boosters are then ejected from the shuttle and fall into the ocean attached to parachutes.
Meanwhile, 2.272 million litres of liquid fuel are being used up in the first eight-and-a-half minutes. That's how long it takes for the shuttle's three engines to get the spacecraft into orbit. After that time, the shuttle orbits the earth once every 90 minutes, travelling at 28,000 kilometres an hour.