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Ants Use Scents Like Road Signs
Ant writes "Animal Planet mentions ants scouting for food place a tiny scent marker on branches that do not lead to a reward. This was according to a study published on Thursday in Nature, the weekly British science weekly. The pheromone acts like a "no entry signal" to other ants, telling them not to waste their time going down that route, it says. The discovery was made by animal scientists at Britain's University of Sheffield.
Seen in The Ant Farm's and Myrmecology's Message Board forum thread."
In soviet russia ants use scents like road signs!
How to confuse a line of ants.
...
0) Locate ants. This part is important.
1) Lick a finger. Normally yours, but hey if you talk somebody into it, go forth and conquer.
2) Draw the moistened digit (which sounds way worse than it is) perpendicularly across the ant trail.
3) Watch in amusement as the ants wander around in a confused crowd, trying to regain the trail.
4) Have a brief existential crisis regarding if the Universe wipes a moistened digit across humanity from time to time.
5)
6) Profit!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Why is this new? Richard Feynman talked about ants long time ago. Even as far back as when he was a kid, as he discusses in his book Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman (which has the text of the book, and this section, about 1/3 of the way down). First non-lamer post.
so that they can have their own private stash?
I would!!!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
This story stinks!
What is this doing on slashdot?
When can I get it in a spray can?
Of SimAnt!
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
I thought we'd known this for awhile. Wasn't it the basis for some of the swarming algorithms we've been using for awhile?
Could the scent be synthesized and used as a way to tell ants not to bother entering a house?
Shades of Grayden
The RAID traps I used this last summer didn't work well. I wonder when someone will formulate a sprayable "do not enter" chemical as an alternative to poisons. Then how long will it take for ants to evolve an adaptation to ignore false "do not enter" signs?
Hell, I learned all this stuff from SimAnt over 10 years ago!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Ant scent trails are old news. It's well understood how they work on the ground. Ant trails on the ground are like roads or paths... they're a line the ants follow. The line has coded patterns of data, but fundamentally the information about where to go is just an analog line on a surface.
This is a different thing. These scents are being used as markers indicating which branches on a tree shoudn't be explored further. It turns the tree into a literal tree data structure! This is wonderful. The data about where to go is being stored in a surprisingly abstract way.
Incidentally, nothing screams "I don't know what I'm talking about" like inappropriately crediting a discovery to a common popularizer. Feynman even acknowledged right in the text that ant trails were already well understood when he did his playing around with them. Very little you read in something like Feynman was discovered by him first. They're collections of anecdotes, not hard science.
It's especially tasteless to link to the books.
Not all that new thing. They do. And remains of a dead ant work about the same way. So if you want them to forbid entry to some place, if there's an estabilished "road", stream of ants, too late, you need to use some mass destructiom chemical weapons. But if you see a single ant scout, smash it and smear it over the likely road, it will quite effectively stop other ants from, say, climbing the garden table legs.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Does anybody remember the early 90s computer game SimAnt? Basically, you got to control an entire 2D ant colony. You didn't directly control all of the individual ants, but instead controlled a single ant which dropped pheremones on the ground, which other ants would follow. For example, you could leave a food pheremone trail leading to a food source, and as long as your fellow ants kept on finding food there, they would add their own pheremones on the trip back to sustain the trail.
:)
It would have been handy to have a "no entry" pheremone in that game. Now that I think of it, SimAnt is a game which is just screaming to have an open-source remake. Somebody with more spare time than me should make such a remake, and add the newly discovered pheremone.
there are still some genetical differences between ants and humans.
:-).
One buddy pissing all way long to the beer machine to mark the shortest path for the rest of the group?... mmm it doesnt sound pretty exciting, specially for the cleaning stuff.
Anyway, it wouldnt be the first time I see someone marking the way from toilet to bar pissing on the floor
...and they use markers for "positive routes". If you want to stop the "positive route" the ants follow, sprinkle some cinnimon on the trail. It's safe for kids and pets and stops the ants from following that trail.
The pheromone acts like a "no entry signal" to other ants, telling them not to waste their time going down that route, it says.
I wish someone sprayed that pheromone on my ex's ankles before I met her.
Trolling is a art,
Maybe it's just me, but as a programmer, I have often thought that it should be conceptually easy to write a program that simulates an ant, since there cannot be much to an ant. Certainly not much sophisticated processing ability.
Yet it seems surprisingly difficult.
One possible conclusion is that the step-wise algorithmic programming models we use add far more complexity to certain problems, such as simulating ant behavior.
This revelation about negative scent markers helps me understand ants better, and may help me understand an alternative programming model with which to program ant behavior.
At least, it suggests that ant behavior is not as simple as I had thought.
As a programmer interested in science, I find this extremely interesting.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
if you are interested in such a model, you can get a simple one programmed in python here: http://www.carleton.ca/ics/courses/cgsc5001/assign 4.html
Actually the link here is specifically about applications of genetic algorithms. But the second application (the first is a maze solver) is a GA used to optimize ant pheremone settings.