Try reducing the amount of times you send the ants over to the client, maybe reduce it to about 20 or 10, and have the client interpolate it on their side, this should reduce the data being sent and also increase performance on the server by a good amount.
A good optimization on the client would be to use BulkMoveTo, or to use octrees to cull ants when not being looked at / too far away. Wind Shake: High performance wind effect for leaves and foliage
Sorry for a late response, hope this helps