Ice-ant

"Of course the crystal bubbles of the ice-ants marked the glacial surface of the hills, but these creatures never emerged, laboring incessantly beneath their little domes that grew like mushrooms as they melted within and received fresh deposits of ice crystals without."

- "Flight on Titan".

Ice-ants are tiny colonial creatures native to the world of Titan.

Biology
Like all Titanian life, their bodies contain arsenic and are thus normally inedible for humans. However, settlers have developed a way to chemically remove the arsenic and use them as a food source. It's also been noted that all native life forms on Titan are asexual.

Some of the ice-ants' domes can be up to six feet in diameter, and reach internal temperatures of over forty degrees, so sheltered are them from the freezing surface. Each individual ant is about three-inches in body length. Despite their name, they're not anatomically similar to Earth insects, and are instead described as "little three-legged ruddy balls that [run] about with a galloping motion". They've been observed to gather the leaves of Whiplash Trees, but it's not known whether they eat them or use them to cultivate fungus as many earthly ants do.

Appearances

 * "Flight on Titan", by Stanley G. Weinbaum (1935)