31–40 of 61 posts
> The ants carry out prophylactic amputations. This not only protects the colony from infection but also doubles the survival rate of the injured workers. To keep everybody around you healthy makes the probability of caching a disease lower for yourself, too. Grooming behaviour in primates helps in the same way. And it is so important that it is linked to all kinds of mental rewards. To let disease run amok in your o…
> The ants carry out prophylactic amputations. This not only protects the colony from infection but also doubles the survival rate of the injured workers. To keep everybody around you healthy makes the probability of caching a disease lower for yourself, too. Grooming behaviour in primates helps in the same way. And it is so important that it is linked to all kinds of mental rewards. To let disease run amok in your o…
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And the injured ant just sits there and takes it, probably in pain, because I'm guessing it also knows that it's best for the colony. Fascinating.
I’m surprised they don’t just eject the injured worker from the colony. I wonder if there are specific tasks the amputated ant then goes on to do, or if they resume their former duties at a lower speed.
I'm going to hazard a speculative answer with poor evidence: love. The ants love one another, as shown by their child-rearing, grooming, playing, the "antennating" mentioned in the article, collective defense, and deliberate handling of their dead. We don't understand their language, but I have a certain faith that ants experience a very similar kinship for their sisters as we. If they were strictly-rational robots t…
So there are serious people who think if the chimps(or any social species for that matter) ever survive 200 million years borrowing ant like behavior at individual and group level is a possible way.
That is super cool. Unfortunately I cannot access the original article to see the methodology, but they mention using a system that can track individual ants in a colony of ~100. I wonder what kind of biometrics allow that. The ants do not seem to be tagged individually in the linked video: https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/fileadmin/uniwue/2026/0702Ameis... Not to be too speciesist, but the ants kind of all look the same…
"... the team examined six colonies, each comprising 110 ants .... Using a fully automated tracking system, the researchers were able to precisely monitor the movements and hundreds of thousands of interactions of each ant, as well as their wound care, over a period of weeks."
I wonder about the background of that software - how does it work, who developed it, how much does it cost, how much data does it output? It's applications are profound, including for human privacy, but I think I already knew about its use there.
If you're interested in ants (and even if you're not) I highly recommend the book Journey to the Ants by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson.
Never heard of that book, thanks for the recommendation. I always found Mark Moffetts talks/interviews/books interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60-iFyfjRo0
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They can look altruistic at the individual level while still being completely aligned with self-preservation at the group level
Ants are also a special case because the vast majority of ants cannot reproduce. Only the queen and drones are reproductive agents, 99.9 percent of the colony are non reproductive, so their investment in the survival of the colony is total, they have no individual agenda.
I'd imagine it as having dozens of clones of myself, and one of them is tasked with reproducing for the rest of us. It sounds like a total lack of individualism, but if the offspring has my genes and is raised like me (potentially by me), how far is it from being my own ?
I’m surprised they don’t just eject the injured worker from the colony. I wonder if there are specific tasks the amputated ant then goes on to do, or if they resume their former duties at a lower speed.
I'm going to hazard a speculative answer with poor evidence: love. The ants love one another, as shown by their child-rearing, grooming, playing, the "antennating" mentioned in the article, collective defense, and deliberate handling of their dead. We don't understand their language, but I have a certain faith that ants experience a very similar kinship for their sisters as we. If they were strictly-rational robots t…