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If I saw a huge dinosaur, I would run for my life. So why do ants seem oblivious to a human towering over them? Do ants not get scared?

• I think it’s all relative. I measured the height of several local ants and found the largest black carpenter ants reach an average of 5 millimetres above the ground. The tallest dinosaurs were about 8 metres high. Humans are mostly less than 2 metres tall. This would make the largest dinosaur about four times the height of an average human while the average human would be about 1000 times the size of an ant.

Some ants do, in fact, seem to sense us – especially if our shadows fall over them – and run. But mostly I suspect we are just too big to enter their awareness. Also, I wonder if ants ever look up.

Earle McNeil, Olympia, Washington, US

• Ants’ attitude to life is vastly different to that of mammals, which invest a great deal of time and energy in their young and have evolved numerous means of self-protection. Ants, on the other hand, invest very little in their myriad workers, all being easily replaceable clones, so they have no individual fear of being killed. If the nest is threatened, however, it’s a different story, and they will defend it to the death.

Also, ants have been around for more than 100 million years. If they think about it at all, which is unlikely, no doubt ants would see humans as a very transient species, occupying but a moment in time on their planet.

Tony Holkham, Boncath, Pembrokeshire, UK