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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."
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.
Well, there WAS a "warning" pheromone. You were supposed to spray it around dangerous places. It just meant "stay away". Since the game wasn't on branches but on ground, the "no entry" pheromone made less sense.
Anyway, get the first colony somewhat running, just mark the first food supply, then change the profile of egg production so that all 3 classes are produced in equal amounts, not the default queens being just a small percent, then go to the macromanagement map and start spreading the queens all over the lawn. Some will die, some will survive and produce more queens. Really soon you will own the game.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
There's probably not much of an evolutionary advantage to being able to go inside houses. Once inside, people generally kill them (the kind of person who would buy the spray in the first place...).
Ants do not evolve at anywhere approaching the same rate as bacteria, either. The generation time is MUCH higher. Also, they can't share genes between species as easily as bacteria (although it's possible), so the same mutation can't jump from species to species like antibiotic resistance can in bacteria.