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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."
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.
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.
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.