How many stomachs does an ant have?

An ant is commonly said to have two stomachs: a crop, or social stomach, and a true stomach.

The crop is a storage pouch that holds liquid food while an ant carries it through the colony. Worker ants can later regurgitate that food to feed nestmates, larvae, or the queen. This sharing behavior is called trophallaxis and is central to how an ant colony distributes nutrition.

Food that an individual ant uses for itself passes through a valve into the true stomach, where digestion and nutrient absorption take place. That division of labor explains why the two-stomach fact is more than a simple anatomical curiosity: one compartment serves the colony, while the other serves the individual.

Strictly speaking, “two stomachs” is a popular description rather than a claim that ants have two mammal-like stomach organs. The crop is a specialized section of the digestive tract, and the true stomach is the main digestive region. Nevertheless, two is the standard answer accepted in general-knowledge quizzes.