Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. Like I'm a second-hand vegan. I eat animals that eat plants :)
reminds me of Erlich Bachman in Silicon Valley, who is a pesca-pescatarian. "I only eat fish that eats other fish"
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Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker
71–80 of 115 posts
Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker
#72It's interesting that given the collective problem solving skills of ants, that they are apparently unable to figure out not to fall into a hole. I wonder if they just fall through by random chance, or if there was some ant at some point that left a "hey guys, there's food down here" pheromone trail, and all the ants that came after just reinforced it into an ant super-highway. If no one ever comes back to say "actua…
There are a bunch of really intelligent looking behaviors from insects, but they seem to have a common theme of "storing" information in the environment. There is a hornet that will sweep and search its nest when it brings food back, but first it will place the food down. If you move the food while the search is going on, it will do the whole search over again when it goes out searching for food. The intelligent behavior seems to be tightly coupled with the environment. Maybe the hole is enough to break some assumptions with the ants.
Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker
#73So what would happen if you ate one of these ants?
You would die.
Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker
#74Now there's an excellent "penal colony gone horribly wrong" sci-fi story there.
It reminds me of the movie Pandorum - http://m.imdb.com/title/tt1188729/
Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker
#75Trickle down economics in the natural world.
Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker
#76Actually, two ants have escaped the pit by climbing out. One was only but a child ant. The other, much later, had its back broken before being thrown into the pit. That ant eventually healed and it too amassed the willpower to climb out.
I think we're missing the clear Antman/Batman crossover opportunity.
Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker
#77It's interesting that given the collective problem solving skills of ants, that they are apparently unable to figure out not to fall into a hole. I wonder if they just fall through by random chance, or if there was some ant at some point that left a "hey guys, there's food down here" pheromone trail, and all the ants that came after just reinforced it into an ant super-highway. If no one ever comes back to say "actua…
They're only smart as a group. Individuals are pretty dumb. And the group doesn't care about "small losses". It's statistics-driven.
Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker
#78It's interesting that given the collective problem solving skills of ants, that they are apparently unable to figure out not to fall into a hole. I wonder if they just fall through by random chance, or if there was some ant at some point that left a "hey guys, there's food down here" pheromone trail, and all the ants that came after just reinforced it into an ant super-highway. If no one ever comes back to say "actua…
If everyone who falls down into the hole is never heard from again, would they even be conscious of the hole? My understanding of ants is limited, but as far as I know most of their communication is scent or contact-based, neither of which could provide communication past that first step. As far as they're concerned, it's effectively a black hole...
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Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker
#79It's interesting that given the collective problem solving skills of ants, that they are apparently unable to figure out not to fall into a hole. I wonder if they just fall through by random chance, or if there was some ant at some point that left a "hey guys, there's food down here" pheromone trail, and all the ants that came after just reinforced it into an ant super-highway. If no one ever comes back to say "actua…
The memory of most ant species only lasts about 1 day. So for the group memory of the hole to persist there would have to be some sort of pattern of ants going to the hole and not going in, or some sort of warning sent near the hole. Otherwise there isn't an obvious way for this memory to persist in the colony.
Otherwise group memory can persist for years or decades to things such as the location of food sources. Which I learned in the wonderful book: "Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior"
https://www.amazon.com/Ant-Encounters-Interaction-Networks-B...
Re: Ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker
#80It's almost poetic how from the ruins of the collapsed human socialist era, other species are creating a truly communist colony.
Ha, the queen doesn't see it that way.
As others have pointed out there isn't really a social hierarchy among ants. Their a mostly decentralized autonomous colonies. The only real hierarchy is who gets to walk on top of others in a tunnel, which it usually the workers going back outside walking over the younger ones who aren't old enough to leave yet.