One ant, no ant. This is the basic rule of insect life, which has fascinated ancient civilizations. Only hundreds or thousands of workers will form a functional viable unit in which the interests of the individual are completely subordinated to what is beneficial to the entire colony. All this without any governing authority to decide, command, organize or divide the work.
Superorganismus, supermozek
Even the queen is not a “dictator” within the anthill. It is true that it ensures optimal conditions for the birth of further offspring with the help of pheromones secreted into the environment. However, it does not interfere in the least whether and which workers will participate in the construction and repair of the anthill and which of them will go out to collect food. Nevertheless, everything runs smoothly. For this reason, scientists sometimes refer to an ant colony as a “superorganism” and individual workers as its “cells”.
The ant colony is able to evaluate the situation and react appropriately to the detected changes. We can also imagine it as a “brain” and individual workers as “neurons”. A single neuron is not capable of more complex reasoning. However, the neurons of the human brain are in a joint coordinated effort to reveal the secret of the atomic nucleus, the creation of the universe or the growth of cancer. The ant “superbrain” is also capable of surprising feats, even if each of the thousands of workers in the anthill does not carry much in her head.
Performances of ant memory
Individual worker ants are of course not completely stupid. After all, they can keep the information about the location of the food source in their memory for several minutes and can reliably return to this place. Ant species Cataglyphis bicolor they live in the sand dunes of the Sahara, where no landmarks are offered to them. If they hesitate even a little in returning to the safety of the nests, they risk lingering in the sun until the sand turns into a red-hot death trap. Therefore, they remember exactly the number of steps and the direction they took on their way from the nest. When they return, they don’t hesitate for a moment.
They also have a very good memory granivorous ants (Pogonomyrmex), who search for seeds in the wide vicinity of the nest. They begin their pilgrimage on a chemically thoroughly marked path that can take them up to twenty meters from the nest. The ant then proceeds on its own and does not mark its path chemically, because seeds are found in the vicinity of the nest completely randomly and knowledge of the location of the find loses its meaning after the prey is taken to the nest.
The ant burdened with a load therefore returns to the chemically marked main path by memory and then brings the seed to the nest. Returning along a busy thoroughfare is extremely important to the colony. The determination to go again to collect seeds depends on how many other granivores returning to the nest with prey the worker encountered on the trail. If there were not enough of them, the worker concludes that the nest would still need some more of the seed, and sets off again. It marks the trail to its end point and from there sets off to find more seeds – again leaving no return markers behind.
Transferring ant know-how
A typical mounded nest forest ant (Formica rufa) built of pine needles, it remains in one place for several decades and hosts many generations of ants during that time. Every morning, the workers leave the anthill for work along chemically marked paths that often lead high into the treetops – in search of aphids and their sweet excrement. As the sun climbs higher in the sky, the area of forest occupied by workers from one colony gradually increases and shrinks again in the evening as the ants return to their nests.
Every day the ants follow the same script, and it is always a small premiere. Workers react to new situations, obstacles, newly discovered food sources or mortal dangers. Actions at one of the sites of the ant colony are reflected in the activities of the entire ant colony. If ants from one direction begin to return with a smaller load of food, their activity in other “work sectors” will increase in intensity to make up for the shortfall. It takes several days for the entire colony to adapt to the change and its activities to “settle down”.
An interesting situation occurs in the spring, when the anthill wakes up from its winter dormancy. The ants survived the winter inside the nest in clusters where they kept each other warm. Chemical markers leading to food sources have long since disappeared, and in addition, new workers were born in the anthill, which never completed the journey to find food. That’s why experienced workers are the first to climb out, for whom the journey to the treetops is nothing unusual. Inexperienced “greenies” let themselves be obediently guided by old warriors. The old experienced workers will disappear quickly, but their “know-how” will be taken over by the next generation of ants. Thanks to this, the workers belonging to one forest ant colony travel for food along roughly the same paths for many years.
Experienced and youthful impetuous colonies
The existence of an ant colony stands and falls with its queen. Once the founder of the colony stops laying eggs or dies, the ant colony will come to a quick end. Ant queens and thus ant colonies live for twenty or thirty years. During this entire time, the colony behaves as one large organism.
Observation of older colonies suggests that they gain experience and wisdom with age. They are more stable than younger colonies and do not react so frantically to strongly disturbing stimuli. As if they stayed on top of things and did not forget to provide the basic needs of the anthill. Young colonies react much more hastily and in tense situations often neglect the necessary course. Thus, older colonies act more judiciously, even if their individual workers are no smarter than workers from younger colonies. How is this possible when individual workers usually do not survive more than a year?
TIP: The most combative of all creatures: Ants on the Warpath
Ants change their behavior depending on the stimuli they receive from other members of the colony. Younger and therefore smaller colonies offer their workers fewer encounters with each other and are thus exposed to a higher risk of error. Just as a sociological survey conducted with too few respondents can lead to false conclusions. On the contrary, older and larger colonies offer large numbers of encounters and the risk of a random error in worker behavior is significantly lower. Older colonies with more female workers also have more “work reserves” for crisis situations and are therefore better able to deal with them.
