# Ant Humiliation and Scorn
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [September 17, 2012, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924 "2012-09-17T00:14:10Z")
**Posts on this page:** 14
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@NadaHappyCamper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NadaHappyCamper)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/1 "2012-09-17T00:14:10Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/2 "2012-09-17T00:25:36Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/3 "2012-09-17T00:34:29Z")
[Eat the eggs! Up with the Queen!](http://interconnected.org/home/more/2007/03/acacia-seeds.html)
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### Author:  [@NadaHappyCamper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NadaHappyCamper)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/4 "2012-09-17T00:35:39Z")
Verrrrry interesting TY.
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### Author:  [@Don\_t\_Panic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Don_t_Panic)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/5 "2012-09-17T00:47:45Z")
> [@NadaHappyCamper](#):
>
> a scout ant comes upon some spilled food and gets all excitied
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.
> [@NadaHappyCamper](#):
>
> Does the scout get chastised by the Queen, put on trial for making a false report or some other type of punishment?
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](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102601823), the other ants may think that you’re dead and dump you at the graveyard until you smell right again).
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### Author:  [@Grrr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grrr)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 1:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/6 "2012-09-17T01:20:22Z")
The ant is then forced to hang out with that lazy, beligerant, druck aas grasshoper.
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### Author:  [@ZenBeam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZenBeam)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/7 "2012-09-17T01:31:24Z")
See [Ant Colony Optimization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms). From the Summary:
> [@](#):
>
> In the natural world, ants (initially) wander randomly, and upon finding food return to their colony while laying down pheromone trails. If other ants find such a path, they are likely not to keep travelling at random, but to instead follow the trail, returning and reinforcing it if they eventually find food (see Ant communication).
> Over time, however, the pheromone trail starts to evaporate, thus reducing its attractive strength. The more time it takes for an ant to travel down the path and back again, the more time the pheromones have to evaporate. A short path, by comparison, gets marched over more frequently, and thus the pheromone density becomes higher on shorter paths than longer ones. Pheromone evaporation also has the advantage of avoiding the convergence to a locally optimal solution. If there were no evaporation at all, the paths chosen by the first ants would tend to be excessively attractive to the following ones. In that case, the exploration of the solution space would be constrained.
> Thus, when one ant finds a good (i.e., short) path from the colony to a food source, other ants are more likely to follow that path, and positive feedback eventually leads all the ants following a single path. The idea of the ant colony algorithm is to mimic this behavior with “simulated ants” walking around the graph representing the problem to solve.
Individual ants aren’t smart, and don’t have to be, but the system works.
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### Author:  [@AaronX](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AaronX)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/8 "2012-09-17T03:11:22Z")
> [@Martian Bigfoot](#):
>
> Ever seen an exited ant? Or a discouraged one?
They appear to get excited if you blow on them/step near them.
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### Author:  [@DianaG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DianaG)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/9 "2012-09-17T04:31:59Z")
> [@Martian Bigfoot](#):
>
> 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.
I’ve heard that they’re prone to high hopes.
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### Author:  [@Don\_t\_Panic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Don_t_Panic)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 5:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/10 "2012-09-17T05:09:47Z")
> [@AaronX](#):
>
> They appear to get excited if you blow on them/step near them.
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.
> [@ZenBeam](#):
>
> See [Ant Colony Optimization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms). From the Summary:
> Individual ants aren’t smart, and don’t have to be, but the system works.
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](http://theantroom.blogspot.no/2006/11/ant-death-spiral.html) of [death](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prjhQcqiGQc). 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.)
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### Author:  [@Khadaji](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Khadaji)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/11 "2012-09-17T12:21:24Z")
> [@DianaG](#):
>
> I’ve heard that they’re prone to high hopes.
Indeed. High-apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes.
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### Author:  [@Inigo\_Montoya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inigo_Montoya)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/12 "2012-09-17T17:10:48Z")
I know bees aren’t ants, but I think [this](http://www.theonion.com/articles/ask-a-bee,12241/) should draw you a pretty clear picture of how an ant mind would work.
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### Author:  [@blondebear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blondebear)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/13 "2012-09-17T18:08:43Z")
Perhaps the OP could post his question on [Antweb.org](http://www.antweb.org/).
ps: where did my rubber tree plant go?
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### Author:  [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)
#### Post date: [September 17, 2012, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ant-humiliation-and-scorn/634924/14 "2012-09-17T18:19:54Z")
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!