how do ants in ant colony know what’s their role? Are they trained for these roles (soldiers, farmers, etc.)? Are there ants that go through “career changes” and switch roles?
In: Biology
Ant behavior is a kind of phenomena we call *emergence* or *self-organization*.
A simple example of self-organization is how a school of fish moves. They all seem to move in coordination, without seeming to take orders from any one fish. There’s a simple set of “rules” that each fish follows, though: stay close to the fish next to it, but not *too* close, and swim away from predators. These simple rules, when combined with a group, cause the school of fish to act as one organism. The rules are just instincts which every individual is born with.
Ants work similarly. They have a simple set of “rules” that are instincts for them. They might have a rule that they desire to make columns from dirt, but if there are too many ants already creating columns, then they’ll go outside to collect food. These rules get a bit more complicated in reality, but they’re still pretty simple for each individual.
Besides their instincts, there *are* certain types of ants, such as drones or workers. They each are born with their own instinct to carry out different “rules” for different circumstances. Drones never become workers and workers never become drones. And then there is the queen. The queen ant mostly just lays eggs, and the workers take care of her. She doesn’t give orders or anything.
There are also pheromones that ants release which cause other ants around them to stop doing what they’re doing and take collective action. For instance, if an ant encounters a foreign ant from a different colony, it will release a pheromone that tells nearby ants to come and defend their colony.
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