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Tracking Whole Colonies Shows Ants Make Career Moves
ananyo writes "Researchers have tagged every single worker in entire colonies and used a computer to track them, accumulating what they say is the largest-ever data set on ant interactions. The biologists have found that the workers fall into three social groups that perform different roles: nursing the queen and young; cleaning the colony; and foraging for food. The insects, they found, tend to graduate from one group to another as they age. By creating heat maps to represent the workers’ positions, Mersch's team showed that nurses and foragers stick to their own company and seldom mix, even if the colony’s entrance and brood chamber are close together (abstract). Cleaners are more widely dispersed, patrolling the whole colony and interacting with both of the other groups. 'The ants can probably be in any place within their enclosures in less than a minute,' says Mersch, 'but even in these simple spaces, they organize into these spatial groups.'"
Specializations. Interesting. Does that imply that ants can learn? One would think they were just a bundle of instinct. Maybe not.
3... 2... 1...
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Apparently (google tells me) ants live about 90 days. Let's say that humans live about 90 years. In that case, saying "The ants can probably be in any place within their enclosures in less than a minute..." equates to "The humans can probably be in any place within their enclosures in roughly 6 hours, but even in these simple spaces, they organize into these spatial groups."
>> workers move between jobs as they get older — nurses are generally younger than cleaners, which are younger than foragers.
So...the workers generally try to further and further away from the queen as they get older? I'll bet there's a Red-Green bit we could reference here.
Wake me up when ants start building Mutalisks...
The old ants know they either have to go to Carousel or leave the colony!
about applicants not having experience. This is the way it should be done: start at the bottom, learn what you need, then move up in the world using your gained experience.
Now compare that to human employers where you're supposed to magically know everything about how an employer works despite never having worked for them.
Further, unlike humans, the ants don't care about how old the ant is. All they care about is if you can do the job.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
and from the Wiki bee article, seem to live rather similar lives:
"For the first 10 days of their lives, the female worker bees clean the hive and feed the larvae. After this, they begin building comb cells. On days 16 through 20, a worker receives nectar and pollen from older workers and stores it. After the 20th day, a worker leaves the hive and spends the remainder of its life as a forager."
Most of the other related general in the bee/ant world also lead similar lives. So I wonder what the researchers were expecting.
-> I dislike sigs...
fails to address is will the ants have to come in saturday to finish up the TPS reports or not?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Actually there has been research showing that older ants move to foraging as it's the riskiest job and they're the least valuable to the colony.
Comparing humans to these super-organisms like eusocial ant and bee colonies where individuals commonly choose to sacrifice themselves for the greater good isn't exactly an equal comparison.
Or are the young ones just getting extra protection because they are more valuable for the colony at that point? When they get older they might become less valuable for the tasks that involve nursing and get demoted to cleaning. Even later, they get to go outside! How nice! From the safety from the center of the colony to the front in afghanistan doesn't sound like a promotion to me. I am not saying they are wrong, I am saying this is so interesting that it deserves a really good extended study to find the real reason for this behavior.
Unfortunately, ant colonies are rife with nepotism. Also, instead of centralising their information, they appear to work entirely upon hearsay and rumour. Basically, if you do find yourself a position in an ant colony, don't expect to enjoy it.
*this space intentionally left blank
"One of the four pointers saying 'come and see', and I saw, and beheld a white
We should hold off judgment until we have analyzed more colonies. This could be the North Korea of ant colonies and the others could have more affluent and free societies.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
Around here, the ants regularly engage in career moves that confuse onlookers. Some fight and claw their way up to the front of the log, only to find that not only is it merely a twig, but alas, they aren't really driving any of it at all.
Then they set their sights on driving the bigger log.
Rinse and repeat, until squashed, poisoned, or lost in the Diaspora.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You old people rant and rant about how unjust it is that employers favor young workers.
You were young once. And when you were young, you touted the benefits of youth. You insisted that actual merit was more important than experience, that your youth means you have better learning aptitude, mastery of modern technologies that the oldies could never understand, and enough energy and enthusiasm to run circles around them. You said all this to land the job.
Now that the next generation says the exact same things you used to say, suddenly it is an egregious travesty.
Step aside old-timer, we need jobs too.
(note, this argumentation tactic works just as well in reverse. Every young worker will be old someday, and will change his tune and refute everything he said to get the job when he was young, insisting that his learning aptitude is as good or better as it ever was, and that his experience means he won't make the costly and devastating mistakes that the young hotheads will invariably make. The only non-agists are the ones right in the middle, who have the worst of both worlds.).
Yes. Young people should be forward looking and touting the value of the experience of older people so that they can reap those benefits when they get more experience.
I think it's time to reinstall SimAnt.
Basically, if you do find yourself a position in an ant colony, don't expect to enjoy it.
No matter which position you find, you can expect it to be somewhat painful, unless you're an anteater.
I don't see any mention of soldier ants, which any colony will have. Could nurses grow into soldiers, for example, or are soldiers born into the role?
YOLO! u need no xperiense when u have SWAG!
Younger ants don't. It's the opposite of humans. :/
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You figure every now and then there should be a mentally deranged ant that tries to terrorize/sabotage the colony. I'd like to hear about this.