I can understand them all walking in a line to and from food sources and their nests…but the specialized roles of “guards” and “warriors” which involve more strategic patterns blows my mind.
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Pheromones, which are basically chemicals that ants can use to communicate with one another. Ants don’t understand where they fit in the grand scheme of the colony, they just act based on the pheromones that are being released around them.
Similar to how cells in your body work. Cells in your ear don’t know they are ear cells, but chemicals around them have told them how to behave and they just do it.
Ant worker roles change throughout their lives. Young ants start as nursery workers and older ants end up in roles such as foraging and guarding. This is a common theme in social insects such as bees. It is usually the oldest worker ants you see out and about. If something were to happen to the nursery, the worker ants can adjust to work in the nursery again to help raise more workers. Pheromones play a huge role in all of this and there is little individual thought each ant has about its role.
In ant species with the special majors and minors, the colony is able to control how many of each are needed by controlling the diet of the larvae.
Different roles use different pheromones, let’s assume you have gatherer, soldier, and caretaker ants.
You have a caretaker ant running around smelling other ants around him and said ant notices “hey there aren’t a lot of soldier ants around, maybe I should help them” then drops the caretaker tasks and starts the soldier job producing soldier pheromones.
Same goes for all the jobs, if there is not enough of those pheromones around, or ants with that pheromone, they will switch jobs.
There is a really good kurzgesagt video about it, definitely worth to watch.
It’s kinda like if someone smelled a lot like sewage you’d probably assume maybe they work in the wastewater facility in town or maybe some sort of sewage cleaning business. Someone who smells floral probably picks flower or arranges bouquets. And… Well in other words it’s all based on your smell for ants
Edit – grammatical
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