# Do ant colonies communicate?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-ant-colonies-communicate/554445
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [September 20, 2010, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-ant-colonies-communicate/554445 "2010-09-20T18:55:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2010, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-ant-colonies-communicate/554445/1 "2010-09-20T18:55:04Z")
Just as the title says. Specifically, I wonder whether they communicate with each other.
Barring that, do ants communicate with ants from other colonies? And if they do, do they do so in a way that emergent properties supervening on the colonies as a whole arise from this ant-to-ant communication?
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### Author:  [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2010, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-ant-colonies-communicate/554445/2 "2010-09-20T20:15:25Z")
[This article](http://www.springerlink.com/content/q8wg15152n017590/) hints at it some. The interesting question is how those ritualized conflicts may change in frequency and nature as resource availability changes and what effects they may have on the behavior of the other colony and by which means it is determined that another colony is weak enough to be attacked rather than warned…
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### Author:  [@Claverhouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Claverhouse)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2010, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-ant-colonies-communicate/554445/3 "2010-09-20T20:31:13Z")
Ants communicate with each other by touching, by waving antennae, by leaving scents attuned to attennae, by touching with attennae, by tapping parts of their bodies against walls, with squeaks from rubbed joints, by the passing of moisture to each other’s mouth when meeting, and I have no doubt by other means we won’t ever know.
Not being ants.
Communication between nests is precisely as useful as communication between nations. Enabling them to have wars; increase territory; capture slaves etc.; , but they’ll mostly leave each other alone unless the other has something they want. In general though they don’t break trade or other agreements since they don’t trade.
\*Ants fight for gain, certainly, but gain often promotes the colony’s survival. In general, ants battle to monopolize food resources, to protect their nest, to gain or protect territory, or to stop other insects from stealing their food. Actually, most ant species avoid fights if they can. Army ants, however, eat the brood of other ant species, and war as a way of life.
\*
**[USA Today](http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2006-10-16-ants-clouds_x.htm)**
**[Pictures of ant fights](http://www.myrmecos.net/antfight.html)**. For some reason these have never held the cachet of cock fights, possibly because of the large crowds of aficionados struggling to get a clear view.
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### Author:  [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2010, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-ant-colonies-communicate/554445/4 "2010-09-20T21:05:06Z")
Here’s [another one](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WMD-4F1SV94-34&_user=10&_coverDate=01/07/1983&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1467779036&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=8ded54a4182cbb2f6518b90f2e981481&searchtype=a).
> [@](#):
>
> Colonies of the honey ant Myrmecocystus mimicus engage each other in elaborate display tournaments. Hundreds of ants are often involved, but almost no physical fights occur. Instead, opponents confront one another in highly aggressive displays, during which they walk on stilt legs while raising their abdomens and heads. The tournaments serve as temporary spatial borders within which food gathering occurs. In this study we develop the hypothesis that tournaments are a mechanism of intercolony communication, which opposing colonies use to gauge each other’s strength. Models are proposed for the behaviorial procedures that seem most likely to underly this capacity. For the first time it is possible to ascertain and compare the properties of such models in relation to a body of test data. It appears probable to us that intercolony communication in this species of ant may depend upon a novel capacity for integrative information harvesting by individual workers.
The interesting issue that **Frylock** seems to be raising **Claverhouse** is the consideration of the colony as superorganism that functions as a problem solving entity and upon which fitness is selected at the colony and not the individual level. The parallel to human nation states falls down because the nature of the decision making process is very different and in the case of human societies communication is by way of diplomacy and acts decided upon by sentient individuals in the interest of the whole, whereas there is no single ant consciously deciding international policy for the colony nor, to the best of our knowledge, any emergent consciousness explicitly problem solving. (Although how would we know if there was an emergent sentience?) But complex problems _are_ being solved for the good of the colony as a whole (and in a manner that is being modeled to form AI systems). Some of these problems involve interaction with other colonies in the area. What is the means by which the colony as an entity uses its individual members to project its strength and secure its resources and by which it “decides” if another colony should be left alone, defended against, attacked, negotiated with, and how do those negotiations takes place in the absence of any sentient individual?