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Tracking Whole Colonies Shows Ants Make Career Moves

Posted by Soulskill on from the executive-in-charge-of-carrying-pieces-of-leaves dept.

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.'"

10 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Specializations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Specializations. Interesting. Does that imply that ants can learn? One would think they were just a bundle of instinct. Maybe not.

    1. Re:Specializations by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Specializations. Interesting. Does that imply that ants can learn?

      Specialization does not necessarily mean learning. They could just switch between different sets of instincts. Whether they learn seems like a straightforward hypothesis to test: if it is true, then more experienced foragers should gather more food.

      I thought it was already well known that ants switch tasks as they age. I remember reading years ago that the oldest ants are the foragers because they were the most likely to die from predation or exposure, and that was at a lower cost to the colony since they were approaching the end of their expected lifetime anyway.

    2. Re:Specializations by TFAFalcon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Just the opposite. The ants often switch jobs when they age and do not specialize in a single job.

      And if you think about it, it must be a pretty good strategy for the hive. Send the old ants on the dangerous jobs - even if they die you haven't lost a worker with a long and productive life in front of them.

    3. Re:Specializations by regular_guy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not always the case. A study had shown that foragers can switch back to nurses due to switching gene sets (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22273-worker-bees-reboot-brain-genes-to-suit-the-task.html) . So while the nursing bees often keep the role for 2-3 weeks, there is a possibility of seeing older nursing bees due to this switch-back in roles.

  2. Introducing Dice for Ants by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Tired of your dead-end role in the colony? Frustrated that your boss doesn't respect your contribution to the brood? Dice for Ants has over 16 billion job openings for drones just like you. Make the jump today to get the skills to be your own queen. Network with other ambitious insects like yourself. Get advice from others who have made the leap from cleaner to forager.

  3. Distance vs life span by pr0nbot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."

  4. Fleeing the queen? Makes sense... by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 4, Funny

    >> 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.

  5. Yawn by rodrigoandrade · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wake me up when ants start building Mutalisks...

  6. Re:I'll bet the ant employers don't whine. . . by Sduic · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  7. Re:Bees and ants are distantly related... by el+jocko+del+oeste · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I haven't read the actual paper yet, but we can draw a few tidbits from the news article and the abstract...

    It's not that the results were unexpected or overturn long held theories about ant behavior. But the work produced a couple of interesting and valuable outcomes. First, they demonstrated that they could effectively tag and track ants in an experimental setting. That by itself is notable--it opens up a lot of interesting research opportunities. Second, they analyzed the tracking data to quantify the spatial and temporal interactions of the ants, and in particular, between functional groups of ants. They were able to determine that there were significant cleaner-nurse and cleaner-forager interactions but limited nurse-forager interactions. Not just in a general kind of way, but with real measurements.