Teenage Mutant Ninja Ants

Recall the creation story of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: four baby turtles living in the sewers of New York City come into contact with an unnatural-looking ooze. Pizza-eating and crime-fighting aside, these characters were something entirely new – a species of creature formed as a result of the (admittedly exaggerated) conditions of the city.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are a fiction. But they're based on fact. The recent discovery of a new city-specific ant species in Manhattan proves it. As The New York Post reports, biologists have discovered a breed of ant living on traffic medians on Broadway between 63rd and 76th streets that's unlike any of the 13,000 known species of ants worldwide. It's a Manhattan-specific ant that the Post has inevitably referred to it as the "ManhattAnt."