I know a lot of people joke about "ants taking over" and whatnot. But the actual scientific reason that ants will never take over is because their greatest strength is their greatest weakness.
That mechanical trick of using "natural hydrolics" that allows them to lift 10x their body-weight over their head, specifically. Thing is, once you get over a certain size in a limb, that actually stops working. If you take a normal ant and increase it to even the size of your index finger, it'd be completely unable to support its own weight. Thus, ants can never gain intelligence through size growth. The only one who could ever become intelligent is the queen (she doesn't need to walk anywhere, so who cares if she can't support her own weight?), and the only control that a queen has over a colony is the ability to release pheramones that say "food is running low, go hunt" or "we have too many occupants to feed, go get yourself killed trying to destroy competing hives."
Because of this, there would need to be something to push ants to develop an entirely different form of locomotion. This is incredibly unlikely, along the order of likelihood that a human is born with gigantic steam-piston arms and no muscle matter (which is the exact-opposite of what ants need to do). So until your local hospital announces the birth of "steamboy the train-based wonder", we're all fine.
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Topic: Real-Life Ant Fortresses (Read 8288 times)