What happens, say if, a scout ant comes upon some spilled food and gets all excitied and goes back to the main nest to turn in a report, then all the other ants head out to gather in the feast and when they arrive the mess ha been cleaned up? Does the scout get chastised by the Queen, put on trial for making a false report or some other type of punishment?
I need to know, thank you.
Serious answer at least to the best of my understanding. Think of the individual ant as a unit of perception in the mind that is the whole colony. One ant laying a trail does not cause a swarming of the ants. It increases the probability of the other ants trying that route. If they find food too then they also lay the trail, reinforcing it, and that increases the probability of more ants coming.
No more responsibility than a single rod or cone has in your eye; the system is set up to separate signal from noise.
Verrrrry interesting TY.
Ever seen an exited ant? Or a discouraged one? There’s no such thing. Ants don’t care if they do something well, or mess up. They don’t have the brain power for that.
No. The queen doesn’t sit on a throne or give orders, nor does she chastise anyone. She’s just as stupid as the other ants, she basically just sits there lays the eggs. There are also no such thing as regularly scheduled employee performance reviews in the ant world (though, apparantly, if you smell wrong, the other ants may think that you’re dead and dump you at the graveyard until you smell right again).
The ant is then forced to hang out with that lazy, beligerant, druck aas grasshoper.
See Ant Colony Optimization. From the Summary:
Individual ants aren’t smart, and don’t have to be, but the system works.
They appear to get excited if you blow on them/step near them.
I’ve heard that they’re prone to high hopes.
Well, yeah, they get exited in that sense, when reacting to threats. What they don’t do is find some food and think “oh boy, I can’t wait to tell the guys at the hive about this”. To the extent that they’re thinking anything at all (not likely) it’s just “wander randomly - food - lay down trail - follow trail”. Just simple instructions.
At least some species of ants are so persistent in following pheromone trails that if the trail happens to loop back on itself for some reason, they can get stuck going in a circle and just keep marching around and around until they die from exhaustion, sometimes by the thousands, in a spiral of death. Certainly not much thinking going on there.
(Don’t get me wrong, I love ants, precisely because they’re so stupid. An ant colony can do great things. Together, ants have complex social structures with different job descriptions, they do architecture and engineering, create farms, raise armies, etc. This all works even though the individual members are all morons, no one tells anyone what do do, and no one has a clue what the colony as a whole is doing. Pretty awesome.)
Indeed. High-apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes.
I know bees aren’t ants, but I think this should draw you a pretty clear picture of how an ant mind would work.
Perhaps the OP could post his question on Antweb.org.
ps: where did my rubber tree plant go?
The offending ant gets dressed down by his CO. The next time you see a colony of ants, look for one that looks like a drill serjeant. He’s in there!