How do ants know I’ve dropped a piece of candy in my room and gather their squad to eat it when there were no signs of ants previously? Do they smell that there’s sugar? Even so, how? The world seems so huge to them to know where to scout
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Ants scout, dropping faint pheromone (behavior-controlling odor) tracks so they can find their way home again. You probably just don’t notice the occasional scout in your room.
When a scout finds something good, it hightails it back to the hive while dropping a strong pheromone track, telling other ants “this way to the food!”
As long as there’s any food remaining, other ants will keep reinforcing the track. When there’s no food left, disappointed ants will return without reinforcing the track, until it vanishes.
They send out scout ants, who search randomly. When they find something good, they return to the nest leaving a pheromone trail. There other ants that are leaving the nest out randomly searching follow the trail and strengthen it with their own trail. That’s how you end up with long trains of ants recovering food.
The initial search is random though. There are just a lot of ants, and you tend not to spot them moving around individuality
They use their antennae to detect the sugar. And they taste to confirm if it’s sweet or not
Do ants have a memory of toxic food?
For example, i gave those parasites some poisonous gel. At first they ate it but when i gave them more few days later, they tend to ignore it.
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Ants are able to locate food sources through their sense of smell and by following pheromone trails. Pheromones are chemicals that can be detected by other ants and are used for communication. When an ant finds food, it will leave a pheromone trail as it returns to the nest. This pheromone trail acts as a sort of roadmap, leading other ants to the food source. In the case of the candy you dropped in your room, the ants may have been alerted to its presence through the pheromone trail left by the first ant that found it. They are then able to follow the trail back to the food source, where they can gather their squad and eat the candy.
To understand how pheromones work, you can think of them as a sort of “chemical language” that ants use to communicate with each other. Just as we use words and language to convey information to one another, ants use pheromones to convey information to other ants. When an ant leaves a pheromone trail, it is essentially saying “follow me to the food!” to other ants. Other ants are able to detect the pheromone trail using their antennae, which are sensitive to chemical signals. By following the pheromone trail, the ants are able to find the food source and gather together to eat
How do YOU identify sugar? You taste it.
And if you were starving with your homies and you suddenly found sugar, wouldn’t you tell your homies?
Ants have no magical homing device, they just send thousands or even millions of ants out to scout for food and if they happen to bump into it, they consume it.
Does this also explain why every morning, and without fail, I find dead or dying ants inside my electric kettle? Are they leaving pheromones as they die, indicating they’ve found water?
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