Do you think you could win a fight with an ant?

Ants are very small. Ants seem innocuous. But what if you were confronted by an ant that was known to act, well, a little crazy?

What if you realised that the ant could bite? And not only bite, but inflict so much pain upon you that it would feel like your skin was on fire?

Would you be unnerved if the ant you met had a reputation for conquering all around it – an ant so successful at battling its way through the world, that it had been given a name, 'invicta', that literally means 'unconquerable', 'invincible' or ‘undefeated’?

And might you think again if the ant in front of you was actually backed up by a million others, which together had resisted all human efforts to exterminate them?

Is that a fight with an ant you could win?

The question is less ridiculous than it first sounds, because around the world, animals and people are being confronted by rogue populations of biting, dominant, invasive, colonising and all-conquering species of ant.

And they are losing the battle.

Just a handful of ant species in particular are to blame.

Of the estimated 14,000 species of ant, only half of have been studied in any detail. Most of these diverse species live in social colonies with a rigid caste system. The queen's role is to reproduce, she is the mother of the colony. Drones are fertile males that service the queen while princesses are her fertile daughters that will establish new colonies. The rest are the queen's sterile daughters that defend the colony as soldiers or provide food, maintenance and care as workers.

The best known ant species have remarkable adaptations to their environments, such as the famous leafcutter ants that carry 50 times their bodyweight, fetching pieces of leaf to use as fertiliser for nourishing fungus. In honeypot ant colonies, specially adapted workers known as repletes store sugar and protein solutions in their swollen abdomens which can grow to the size of a cherry. Slavemaker ants are named for their habit of shirking the hard work,instead capturing the pupae of other colonies to raise as slave workers.

These tiny insects are incredibly tough: fire ants can form rafts to float on flood waters, species in Canada produce their own anti-freeze to survive at below -20C, while the desert ants of the Sahara forage in searing 60C heat.

Such evolutionary adaptations are fascinating; but in the wrong place they are just the advantage needed to dominate an ecosystem, with devastating consequences.

A few ant species have adapted so well to new environments that they are called 'tramp ants' due to their ability to move freely around the world.

They have become both famous and feared, for wreaking billions of dollars worth of damage and pushing other species to the brink of extinction.

These ‘tramp ant’ species are so organised and efficient they are causing concern around the globe; earning inclusion on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) list of the 100 most invasive species.

Welcome to the battle of the ants, where people and animals are going to head to head with the Argentine ant, big-headed ant, red imported fire ant, little fire ant and yellow crazy ant, which together vie for the title of world’s worst.