CHICAGO — A horde of ants on a food-gathering mission descends upon the remains of a Keebler Sandies Pecan Shortbread cookie, breaking off tiny crumbs.

Normally such raids end with a victory march back to an underground labyrinth. But this is no picnic. It’s a science project.

After leaving out the cookie pieces for an hour, Lake Forest College biology student Jeremy Boeing will scoop up all the nearby ants, freeze them overnight and ship them to a North Carolina laboratory for identification.

The collection, carried out near the Museum Campus/11th Street Metra stop amid sniffing dogs and quizzical looks from joggers, is part of a national effort to identify and map the diversity of ants in the U.S.

Based in North Carolina, the School of Ants project asked ordinary citizens to collect ants in metropolitan Chicago, New York and Raleigh/Durham. Anyone with an index card, a plastic bag and money for cookies and shipping could have participated.

Creating a map of the nation’s ants is expected to help scientists understand the movement of ants from one region to another, investigate changes in the ant ecosystem and maybe even identify new species.

Fewer than 13,000 ant species are known worldwide, and scientists believe there may be as many as twice that number.

In the hustle of city life, it can be easy for Chicago redients to forget that they share the city with millions of six-legged creatures, but about 90 species of ants are thought to live in the area.

“If humans were to disappear today, the ants would keep on working. But if ants were to disappear, we would miss them,” said Boeing. “They do jobs that most people aren’t aware of — they break down dead plant material so that new plants can grow. Ants are nature’s recyclers.”

Now an entomology researcher at the University of Florida, program director Andrea Lucky launched the School of Ants a little more than a year ago as a post-doctoral researcher at North Carolina State University. She was intrigued by the unexplored wildlife in our backyards and thought others would be too.

By conducting an ant census of sorts, scientists hope to learn more about what ants do, what they eat and how they live. In areas where historical ant records exist, they can figure out if one type of ant moved away as a new type moved in.

In its first season, the project collected 80 ant species and attracted so much interest from would-be citizen scientists nationwide that Lucky had to stop sending out ant-collecting kits.

This year Lucky is narrowing the focus to a few major urban areas. “New York gets a lot of traffic in terms of shipping,” she said. “Chicago came up because it has so much green space and a great climate for ants.”

The collection process also has been simplified. Participants set out part of a cookie on an index card and wait for an hour. Then they scoop the card, the cookie and any ants attached into a plastic bag, freeze it overnight and mail it to the School of Ants Team at North Carolina State University along with information about the collection date, time, location and weather.

The bait must be Keebler Pecan Sandies, which has been the go-to cookie for professional ant collectors for as long as anyone remembers, likely due in part to its combination of ant-attracting sugar, protein and fat.

Different ant species operate differently, but in general a colony is made up of a queen and her workers. The workers build and maintain the colony and bring back food, while the queen reproduces, making new workers. A queen can live for as little as a year or as long as a couple of decades. Workers may live for a few months to a few years, depending on the species.

Ants like to make their homes in places that are warm and moist. They enter buildings seeking food and water, warmth and shelter, or refuge from dry, hot weather or flooded conditions, according to ant management guidelines from the University of California.

One of the most common ants in the Chicago area is the pavement ant. Introduced from Eurasia, it lives in colonies that grow very quickly in the late spring and early summer, resulting in ritualized turf battles among different groups.

“They set the boundaries of their territory by staging these huge battles that sprawl over sidewalks,” said Alex Wild, a nature photographer and local ant expert who is helping identify species from Chicago. “From a distance it looks like a little oil spill, but when you get close you see this seething mass of ants on the sidewalk. Remarkably, few ants actually get killed during this. They seem to be testing each other.”

Wild earned a Ph.D. in entomology from the University of California at Davis in 2005. “I have always liked ants,” he said. “As a 5-year-old, I was out there trying to collect carpenter ants in a Styrofoam cup.”

As an adult, Wild said, he is intrigued by the collectivist nature of ants.

“There is something about their social behavior which just makes them interesting,” he said. “In addition to having that alien insect, weird robot look to them, they live in groups — something that we as social primates can relate to with ants that we can’t so much with some of the more solitary insects.”