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Ants Use Scents Like Road Signs

Posted by samzenpus on from the I-use-a-similar-method-to-gaurd-my-office dept.

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."

6 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Feynmans Ants by dorkygeek · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I have not read the complete material from the links you posted, but it looks like Feynman thought that bad trails could be distinguished by a fewer quantity of the scent as ants would leave on a successful trail. The article although seems to indicate that ants use a *different* marker to signal bad trails.

    --
    Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
  2. Good for keeping ants out of a house? by Grayden · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Could the scent be synthesized and used as a way to tell ants not to bother entering a house?

    --
    Shades of Grayden
  3. Anyone remember SimAnt? by FleaPlus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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. :)

  4. Re:do they ever lie? by panthro · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not at all. Varyingly complex behaviour designed to fool other animals (same or different species) is instinctive and genetic in many species. However, ants are much more socially dependent than most animals and would not benefit from stashing food for themselves individually.

    It would be interesting to see if they put such "do not enter" markers on the far side of food locations, near the interface with another competing colony. My guess is the ants can distinguish the originating colony of the pheromones, though.

    --
    If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
  5. neat. by David_Shultz · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Many of us are no doubt familiar with models of ant foraging behavior that make use of pheremone dropping. For those of you who didn't catch the important difference mentioned here, it's basically the discovery of a different type of pheremone (whereas previously we had imagined that the ants made use of only two pheremones 'home' and 'food' -now there is 'no food').

    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.

  6. Re:Ant by I(rispee_I(reme · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Currently living in Thailand, ants are very plentiful.

     
    They're that way everywhere, except Antarctica.
    I hear that Sydney, Australia is one giant anthill
    underneath, due to an invading foreign ant species.
    I will leave the alien ant overlord joke to the first
    reply.