Ants - The equilibrium theory

[The Snark]

Preface: A moment of panic then a sigh. The study data the college gave me was also on the hard drive that died and the students involved in the study have long since graduated. So I'm winging this from memory. Contributions are most welcome. Now where the heck to begin...

Multiple species or sub species of ants develop a communal nest. As the nest grows outlier nests are formed. - Reference analogy, a sun and planetary gears.

Indicators such nests have formed.
- Workers taking seemingly useless trash back to the nests.
- Entire nests moving from one outlier nest to another with workers transferring the eggs.

Given factor: the sourcing ants that procure resource materials are in all intents and purposes robotic. They execute simplistic rudimentary programs given to them by the hive mind. The hive mind does not operate in a logical manner such as supply and demand.

The equilibrium factor:Comparisons are made by the hive mind between outlier nests. When one is resource rich, roughly a simply computer code equivalent of > greater than, several operations are executed and the workers are given instructions.
1. Transfer resources between nests
2. Search for similar resources utilizing the workers primitive senses, odors = resource, procure and return to other outlier nest.
3. Transfer the entire nest with eggs to the more resource rich nest.

The purpose being establish equilibrium between nests. In computer code a very simplistic program. Too simplistic in several ways.
There is no END or STOP routine at the end of the instruction code. The worker ants in that particular nest at that time will continue to execute that particular search and procude program until they die. Once equilibrium between nests is established the next generations of workers are not given that program to find a particular resource.
- Indicator of the procurement program executing is lone ants randomly wandering around not following the scent trails. If these ants are encountered by the next generations of ants that have new instruction sets and they have an object - the scent of a new procurement program the resource gets handed off to the new sets of workers.

The result of this is the entire community of ants of multiple generations in the various outlier nests executing a variety of search and procure programs. The programming is a constant ongoing function of establishing the equilibrium between outlier nests.

Now multiply the procurement operation by several thousand at any given time. The individual workers of multiple generations and nests each with varying differences in their search and procure programs. = Endless loop, continuing ongoing cycle.

And that is about all I can remember of the study. a constant balancing act of outlier nests attempting to establish equilibrium and each time a nest comes upon a new resource the balance gets thrown off and a new equilibrium program is set into operation.

 

[IntermittentSygnal]

So they're all socialists.... ;-}

What about when I knock out a bunch of their workers? Would worker's switch queens to maintain this equilibrium? Or only shift members' tasks?

 

[The Snark]

What about when I knock out a bunch of their workers? Would worker's switch queens to maintain this equilibrium? Or only shift members' tasks?

Too complex. Workers get one program which they execute until they die. Keep in mind ants in a traii are all given one set of programs. Some simple transfer machanisms, others protection, others foraging - search and procure, and so forth. They are all walking dead. Other generations are given different programs. Dozens or even hundreds of generations and different programs from different outlier nests may be in operation at any given time.

There has been no determination found that ants can change their programs, dropping one and taking up a different task. Entirely mindless robots. Only the hive mind does thinking and that on a very primitive -meet the equilibrium- operation. The test being removing individual ants away from whatever operation they are executing and they just wander aimlessly. No odor trail, no programming to deal with an unknown environment. If they are programmed with a search and procure they will attempt to find an object but without the scent trail they can't find their way
home. This BTW is seen all the time. Individual ants carrying objects then just wandering. If they find a scent trail they will follow it, Sometimes in the wrong direction, sometimes carrying an unwanted object, their program out dated.

 

[IntermittentSygnal]

The way they will carry their dead to a specific chamber is fascinating, too. I've wiped a trail of one with the lemon stuff and watched the chaotic running looking for the scent trail he was just on.

 

[Substantial]

Ants actually do not store their dead in a chamber. They remove the dead completely to the surface (as observed for 10 years+ in keeping my own colonies of many different Genus- Pogonomyrmex, Tetramorium, Lasius, Myrmecocystos, Myrmica, Formica, etc ,etc) none of which at any time have stored dead colony members in any chambers. Also what could mistakenly be seen as ants bringing the dead back into the nest is usually workers bringing back the carcasses of a conquered colony to be processed for nutrients. Ants are some of the most clean arthropod/creature on earth they are constantly trying to maintain a sterile space in which to lay eggs and raise brood safely. Mold, bacteria, and fungi are maintained every day by the ants, there sterile saliva is used to lick clean surfaces and themselves. Ants use what is called a graveyard above ground in which they store there dead. Storing dead carcasses, germinated/old seeds, old prey items deep in the nest all put the entire colony at risk to mold, bacteria, and fungus. Ants do no build a nest that is to large in the wild, meaning this could only occur in captivity when a keeper introduces a much to small colony to a much to large nest.

-There is a lot of background info missing from this!!! what Genus? what Species within the genus? are these ants observed parasitic, slavers, grain eating... etc. I do agree with a lot of this information as it has been proven ants use pheromones' to communicate but...

- They are NOT the Walking Dead, they never switch queens EVER, I observe everyday ants switching tasks on a daily basis... When colonies are small this is most visible, The first generation or Ninatics are always switching tasks because there isn't enough workers to do everything that needs to be done. Ants that did sterilization in the morning might be foraging in the evening. Also ants Show an extraordinary amount of altruism to each other cleaning, grooming, Feeding each other( trophallaxis) and even comforting one another. Yes there are casts of ants who do the same thing there whole lives such as a Replete. But this is not the case with every cast of ant within the colony. Another Example of this is that solider of the phedoele Genus are Replete and Soldier. Meaning they have to constantly be Storing, feeding working ants and defend the nest at the exact same time showing multitasking within one single ant. When the colony is threatened or attacked, the worker ants stop working and help soldier ants defend, other workers continue working who aren't directly effected. Ants are apart of the Hive mind But also exhibit many individual thinking behaviors. YES a ant can switch tasks when it wants.

- To the point that ants carry useless trash back to the nest is a incorrect observation made on the part of the studiers. out of the 50+ colonies and over 20 Genus kept, none of my colonies have been observed bringing "trash" back without sense or use. Again trash brings mold, bacteria, and fungi. Trash is stored above ground as well. As mentioned above about the grave yard, it serves as a dumpster, bathroom, and a place for the dead. Meaning if they were carrying back something to the nest it had some type of value to them , whether it is nutritional, or mechanical. Here is 2 pictures of graveyard/dump examples from my Pogonomyrmex occidentalis colony 3000+ workers, 3 years old tending to the dumpster/ grave yards in the outworld. There are dead workers, poop, and seed husk in the dump. Certain species like the above mention are granivorous and store natural seeds such as dandelion and quinone underground for food storage in Sterile Dry silos.
View attachment 440831

 

[IntermittentSygnal]

My apologies for my misinformation and thank you for the correction. I saw an enclosure at the reptile store that had a short tunnel near the top over to a much smaller container where they were taking their dead. I must have misunderstood the chamber motif in the discussion with the worker there. I see what you are saying in your pictures there.

 

[Substantial]

No problem, I love talking about ants and helping other understand them, and their extremely complex and intelligent lives so people with stop using Terms such as THE WALKING DEAD, MINDLESS, PESTS. People think of them as pests but a lot of the information circulating is misinformation ( especially on the Camponotus genus eating wood lol). There are so few Myrmecologist in the USA you could probably count them on both hands. Ants are extremely diverse ranging from carpenter ants to Ants that Enslave other Ant species, to Ants that live symbiotically with aphids to farm the sugary secretions they produce to tiny thief ants who secretly live with larger ants and eat there food. Ants attribute to natural germination of the flora on our planet and also widely attribute to natural aeration of the soil. Ants are Amazing little creatures.

 

[Substantial]

Ants Can love too!

 

[The Snark]

@Substantial Very. Fascinating and informative. Along with opening a gigantic can of worms. I'm going to divide this up into two sections, what I know or have deduced of the above study and my own observations of the ants local to our house and it's immediate environment.

The study.
Academic backgrounder. A university that offers masters degrees in botany and biology and study courses for PhD candidates. They don't directly offer the PhD but the universities that do often utilize that university's resources.
The head of the biology department at that time had PhDs in both botany and biology. His fields centered on forest floor environments and he spent a lot of time focused on regeneration of destroyed watershed. I saw several areas in and above the national park that had been demarcated with stakes driven into the ground and ribbons on trees.
Deduced. The ants in the study were in an area - recalling here from my trips through that area. In part, native natural deciduous forest, adjacent to destroyed watershed and burn off areas, with one access road where people would go in and picnic. Pretty well isolated so a control was established. No majors variations ongoing in fauna or flora and the debris left by human incursion minimal and predictable. All the usual for an accurate extended period of time study.
Guesswork: Students undergoing a 2 year lab and field study course in environmental science.
- So we can assume a controlled experiment.
The ants in that area, from my observation consisted of ants similar in appearance to the sweet-grease eating ants found throughout the western US. With the exception they all had a swarm mentality and would readily attack animals that disturbed the trails. They all would bite and the venom load was very substantial - significantly painful. My guess is the most common species of ant found throughout most of northern Thailand. The variation from the ant mentioned in the US is all go into attack mode upon being disturbed.

The ants in our home environment.
The aforementioned black ant. Their trails are extremely dense and up to 1 1/2 inches across. Commonly there are so many in these trails they carve an easily visible path in the soil after a few hours. Among these ants which I assume are the workers are massive soldier ants which go ignored by the trail workers and follow along it. Roughly 10 to 20 times the size of the workers with very formidable mandibles. >I do not know their function or purpose as they do not tend to go on the attack with the workers when a trail is disturbed.< The ratio of soldier type to the workers is roughly 1000 to 1, very possibly out to 2000 to 1 or more.
The worker ant trails. After about 48 hours of establishing a trail the path they carve in the dirt can be a half inch deep. To give some idea of the dense population on these trails.
Sometimes they transfer eggs in these trails. Roughly around 10-20% of the time

Swarming. This perplexes me. Workers with soldiers. To give a common example: Our house ant free for weeks will suddenly have several million ants swarming on the floor in a period of a few hours. At the same time they have a trail but much looser and less organized. Sometimes using the floor as simply transit from the nests out front near the road to the very well established nests at the back of the house. A ratio of maybe 10 to 20 soldier types for every million of the workers. Since we have a white tile floor observation is obviously easy. Also they make their presence known as the cats will not go downstairs when swarms are present.
The swarming time duration varies quite drastically. From less than 24 hours on up to 2 to 3 weeks. Some are attracted to water but certainly not the majority. A few thousand ants drowned in the cat water dishes.

Satellite nests. As they build in the attic. Usually without eggs. I'd be very much interested in knowing the purpose of these sub nests. Without soil, they maintain a trail with the underground nests. So these satellites apparently have some purpose or purposes. Staging areas? Dispersal of unwanted materials? Unusual resources?

Other ants present, obviously not the above species.
Tiny red ants. Up to a hundred thousand or so can be in a nest that fits inside an electrical receptacle box. They are attracted to electrics. Formic acid is intensely present and nests can be detected by the odor. They can destroy electrical appliances, most commonly defeating isolation layers of transformers by causing ionized connections between the iron layers. This is very common. Their bite is as bad or worse that the common black worker ants. When they attack a food source, as the dead scorpion in the carport at present, all other ant species avoid them. Two days now chewing on that scorpion and not a single black worker in sight. When the ordinary black worker ants take on a body such as that they will take it apart and carry it off within 24 hours. The tiny red ones aren't physically capable of carrying off pieces of chitin. Only soluble tissues get taken off.

'Bullet' ant. Analogous to the south American species. Quite rare. Roughly 10mm to 12mm long. Only seen as random foragers. Their bite is extremely similar to when I got bit by a rattlesnake. It's common for it to trigger some degree of shock from the intensity of the pain. I have no idea as to where they nest or any of their traits or habits.

Large black ants. 8mm to 10mm. The least formidable of the local species. Same trails and foraging. Mild bite and do not go on a mass attack mode. Now quite rare here. It appears their nests get invaded and raided by more common aforementioned species.

The train ants. DOES NOT COMPUTE. Now and then I see their trains. 10mm to 12 mm long, they very closely follow each other in train fashion of up to 20 or 30 members, randomly wandering. I've never seen their nests, never have seen them carrying eggs. Just these quite high speed little trains meandering about. Never have seen them foraging or maybe those trains are their foraging.


@Substantial And as in the movie, Over to you, red leader one. How about filling in some blanks??

 

[Ponerinecat]

Too complex. Workers get one program which they execute until they die. Keep in mind ants in a traii are all given one set of programs. Some simple transfer machanisms, others protection, others foraging - search and procure, and so forth. They are all walking dead. Other generations are given different programs. Dozens or even hundreds of generations and different programs from different outlier nests may be in operation at any given time.

There has been no determination found that ants can change their programs, dropping one and taking up a different task. Entirely mindless robots. Only the hive mind does thinking and that on a very primitive -meet the equilibrium- operation. The test being removing individual ants away from whatever operation they are executing and they just wander aimlessly. No odor trail, no programming to deal with an unknown environment. If they are programmed with a search and procure they will attempt to find an object but without the scent trail they can't find their way
home.

This is blatantly wrong Ants are very capable of adapting to their environment and making individual decisions. There is no hive mind, programming, or commands involved; the functioning of any eusocial animal society functions based off of emergent behavior using communication and individual response to stimuli. Each worker ant is just an intellegent as any other member of the colony, including the queen. Albeit this is not saying much, as each individual ant tends to be rather "dumb" compared to other arthropods (exceptions exist in species with particularly small colonies, where workers exhibit intelligence and a large degree of independance more in line with, say, eusocial and solitary wasps.) There have been numerous studies on how ants can adapt to different stimuli, threats, and opportunities, both in isolation and in groups. It is a well established fact that ants and by extension most if not all other eusocial animals have individuals which change their general trend in behavior over time in line with their age. To give some examples:
It has been experimentally shown that ants will monitor the caste and labor composition of their colony and respond in turn. In species with a major or soldier caste, the major/soldiers are usually inactive and reserved for food processing/defense. Menial tasks and colony maintenance are left for the worker castes to fulfill. However, when the worker to major/soldier ratio is experimentally reduced to below a tolerable level, majors/soldiers will begin to perform tasks usually reserved for the worker caste in an attempt to make up for the labor deficiency. This is done rapidly without any new adult ants, or "generations" as you call them.
In some species where the lifespan of the queen is particularly short and workers are born with functioning ovaries, individual worker ants will periodically engage in a colony wide power struggle where the most "fit" reproductively viable workers will fight to secure the privilige of egg laying in an attempt to make sure their own genetic material gets some sort of direct representation in the colony's output of reproductives. Worker ants will compete in a tournament of sorts, asessing the fitness of rival workers, recognizing individuals, and assignging a fluid status to them. A dominance heirarchy forms over time until the worker deemed most "fit" emerges at the top and assumes reproductive status, maturing her ovaries and supressing the egg laying of nestmates.
Ants with developed social stomachs have a stereotyped "begging" behavior used by colony members who wish to solicit food from others. This takes the form of a complex but somewhat random display of body language, where repeated physical touching and stroking or rapid rocking by the begging ant is used to trigger the regurgitation of food by the donor. This is not a planned or "programmed" action, but is an individual responding to a bodily need by taking advantage of an environmental opportunity (the passing of a well fed nestmate.) Morever, the potential donor is perfectly capable of ignoring this signal. The donor ant is not "programmed" to respond to the begging by immediate regurgitation, but is able to asess priorities and make a decision based off of that. An ant responding to a distress pheromone or a nest breach, for example, will certainly ignore the begging of a passerby while moving towards the threat.
A common misconception surrounding ants, which I see hints of here with the reference of a "hive mind," is that individual ants are puppets of sorts serving a greater good. This is certainly not the case. Altruism stems from the fact that advancing the reproductive success of a close relative (the queen of the colony, generally the mother of the workers) indirectly advances the reproductive success of the altruistic individual, as they share genetic information. Ants are rather self serving, in this respect. They do not so much serve the colony and the queen so much as they use the colony and the queen, providing work and resources to enable the proliferation of shared genetic material. This is most evident in the case of the "ant tournament" explained above, but can also be seen in species that are generally less individualistic. For example, worker ants will often forcefully and quite violently drag their nest queen away from a source of danger or during nest relocation against the will of the queen, who may be oblivious of the change which was decided upon by communication between workers alone; they do not serve a higher intellegence, they are moreso using their nest queen as an egg laying machine that needs to be maintained and protected to function.
In terms of individual behavior, seperate from the colony entity, ants are aslo capable of a significant degree of flexibility. Foraging ants, for example, will take a random looping path in search of food, but will not retrace their steps back upon finding food but will instead make a more or less direct path to the nest itself without following any sort of premarked pheromone trail. Following a trail only occurs after an ant has set that trail by navigating back to the nest from some point of interest and actively working to get the attention of previously sessile nestmates. This navigation is often attained through visual means in species with large eyes, where an ant will memorize distinct landmarks such as surrounding foliage or geographical features to create a "mental map" of sorts to facilitate rapid return to the nest. More impressively, but not very surprising given its prevalence among many animals, is the ability of many ants to use the sun and its angle relative to the observing ant as a compass. This is certainly not a "programmed" association, as the angle of the sun is constantly changing with the time of day and the position of the ant, and yet the ant is still able to make accurate predictions about its position relative to the nest at any time of the day independant of the input of nestmates, as long as the sun is visible.

 

[Arachnophobphile]

This is all fine and dandy....but can an AI program be created to mimick this behavior and used to program robotic ants???

That's what I would like to know. Also how long would it take to overtake the world with giant robotic ants?