This species performs expansive, organized swarm raids that give it the informal name, Eciton army ant.

[5] Group foraging efforts known as "raids" are maintained by the use of pheromones, can be 200 metres (660 ft) long, and employ up to 200,000 ants.

[6] Workers are also adept at making living structures out of their own bodies to improve efficiency of moving as a group across the forest floor while foraging or emigrating.

Workers possess single-faceted compound eyes, double-segmented waists, a well-developed sting, and specialized tarsal hooks on their feet with which they cling to one another to form bridges and bivouacs.

[citation needed] Eciton burchellii ants are found in the tropical jungles of Central and South America, from Mexico to Paraguay.

Recent taxonomic rules, however, adhere more strictly to the original form;[12] the name Eciton burchelli is now largely regarded as invalid.

The queen usually copulates with 10–20 males, which leads to a colony with a large number of worker patrilines, which are full-sibling families with the same father and mother.

For species of ants that migrate frequently, such as the Eciton burchellii, the location of the nest may be the most important thermoregulation tool.

[18] Besides being group predators, members of an Eciton burchellii colony cycle between nomadic and stationary (or "statary") phases.

This chronic predation by the colonies will evolutionarily favor insects and other prey that possess adaptions to counteract the ants, such as chemical weaponry for defense or those that sexually mature at a smaller size.

Once in place in a hole, the ant(s) can stay there for many hours or until it is dark and the traffic flow has diminished greatly, at which point they will return to the nest.

[21] Ants, in general, are excellent organisms to study differences in thermal ecology for a number of reasons: they are ectothermic, can be collected easily, their environmental temperatures can be manipulated, and they can be held in captivity for extended periods of time.

Eciton burchellii colonies have been found to inhabit areas with no direct sunlight, regulate their bivouac's temperature and airflow, and prefer the closed-canopy forest environment over a fragmented one.

If need be, the ants retreat to the cool, humid bare soil or huddle beneath stones and logs in order to recover from the endurance of high temperatures.

Even though the males can fly, their dispersal is limited by the predation of nocturnal insectivores that can easily spot their larger bodies in the cleared forest patches.

With the fragmented forest hindering the males' dispersal, gene flow is reduced among the Eciton burchellii populations.

[30] Higher elevations were found to help alleviate some of the effects of the cleared forests because of the decreased temperature and increased cloud cover.

[31] In general, Eciton burchellii colonies do not follow the compass bearing of the previous day's raids based on pheromone trails.

[18] Social animals need an alarm system to alert others to defend against potential threats or to recruit others to attack prey.

The specific pheromone used by the Eciton burchellii species is 4-methyl-3-heptanone, which produces an intense, but short-lived, behavioral response by others in the colony.

When the ant colony swarms the forest leaf litter, arthropods flee, which are then eaten by the birds, lizards, insects, and even some mammals that attend the raids.

Consequently, a single mated pair may track several colonies a day by drawing on the collective knowledge of this larger network.

[36] The antbirds have a parasitic relationship with Eciton burchellii which inflicts a cost that is proportional to the number of birds in the flock.

This imposes a selective pressure on the colonies, as the arthropods collected from these raids represent nearly half of the food consumed by the ants.

The effective population size of Eciton burchellii is further constrained because of flightless queen ants and colony fission.

Research shows that these populations were capable of maintaining a high rate of gene flow because of the male individuals.

Insects and other arthropods attempting to escape from E. burchellii are flushed into the attending flocks, and a number of species have evolved behavior to obtain most of their food by following swarms.

On Barro Colorado Island, Panama, 5% of the 3156 worker ants examined had mites on them, with the Scutacaridae and Pygmephoridae families being the most abundant.