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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."

15 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Ant by daeley · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
    1. 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.

  2. Feynmans Ants by Midnight+Warrior · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    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. Re:Feynmans Ants by Vellmont · · Score: 2, Informative

      Because they've discovered that ants not only leave "follow me" trails, but also "don't follow me" trails. Feynman only found evidence for the "follow me" trails, which I'd guess had been known about for a while.

      --
      AccountKiller
  3. do they ever lie? by squarefish · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.
    1. 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.
  4. Sounds good by CXI · · Score: 2, Insightful

    When can I get it in a spray can?

  5. 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
  6. Better than RAID poison? by PurifyYourMind · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

  7. Re:Let me be the first to say... by MarkRose · · Score: 2, Funny

    This story stinks!

    Admit it: you were antsy to make a pun.

    --
    Be relentless!
  8. 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. :)

    1. Re:Anyone remember SimAnt? by Vo0k · · Score: 2, Informative

      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"
  9. 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.

  10. Re:Something to see by panthro · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...since there cannot be much to an ant. Certainly not much sophisticated processing ability.

    Why do people automatically assume that ants, and for that matter, other non-human animals, are simple and/or dumb and/or not self-aware? It seems this idea that humans are so tremendously much more complex than any other organism sprouts from thin air (or thick ego), and it would take a dolphin obtaining a Ph.D. in particle physics to convince them otherwise.

    At least, it suggests that ant behavior is not as simple as I had thought.

    Probably not. Our behaviour is as complex as it is mainly due to the degree of social interaction inherent to our species. Now, show me an ant, and I will show you a social creature if there ever was any.

    --
    If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.