Fascinating article. Even though chimpanzees are believed to be the most intelligent species other than humans, apparently ants have the knowledge to build mounds which are the equivalent of giant cities complete with plumbing and traffic systems, despite having such small brains:
Individual ants? No.
Colonies? I’ll also go with “no,” until I see a chimpanzee spiral of death.
No.
Even simple “queue behavior” can give the illusion of intelligence. Are the individual cells in your body smarter than you are? After all, they can construct a kidney and you can’t.
Have ants ever shown any ability to solve problems? Or to learn?
I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.
astorian: Tricky… Ant colonies do solve “problems,” such as building a mound on rocky soil, or tilted and uneven ground, or around tree roots.
They don’t use “intelligence” to do so, however.
(ZonexandScout gives a good example in cells working together to make a kidney.)
In my case specifically sadly enough, yes I believe that they are. 
I don’t believe in general that this is the case though.
Well unless they’re born with all this knowledge pre-progammed into them like a piece of computer software, I would’ve guess they would’ve somehow had to learn this via trial and error.
They are.
And, of course, that information came into existence by a VERY long process of trial and error, known as evolution. So the real joy of this is that it’s a little (a lot!) of both!
It’s both. The programming is called heredity, and the ‘programmer’ (because seriously, we all know where this is heading) is Natural Selection - in the previous generations of ants. Traits that work better tend to persist. Traits that don’t work so well tend to die out.
You can potentially destroy an ant colony by giving its workers stilts. That doesn’t fill me with confidence.
I can almost understand why one would do this, but I’m not entirely sure how one would do this.
Grad students, apparently.
Here’s an article on the ant stilt study.
Here’s an article about (simulated) ants solving the Travelling Salesman problem;
This has been mentioned on this board before. Ant colonies appear to be able to solve a different set of problems to humans; they don’t have the answers preprogrammed into their brains, but they do have behaviours which can apparently search for solutions.
I googled for some of the earlier threads, and found this one that mentions sea cucumbers “just staying down there eating” (at which I immediately thought of sea pigs.) Later in the thread there is a link to a Scientific American article on ants–one of the recommended links over on the right side of that page happened to be…an article about sea pigs, published today. Funny how coincidences like that can pop up.
Ants are stupid!