are the individual ants smart or is it the queen or do they like combine intelligence or something
In: 14
It’s all instinctual. They behave in a way that is preprogrammed via genetics and triggered by stimulus or scent pheromones that other ants will release that let the colony know what they should be doing.
One ant sees an intruder and releases a chemical that says “attack! Help! Intruder!” And other ants just respond to the scent.
They don’t really have a “hive mind” like you might read about in fiction. Or at least, it’s not psychic powers.
Each individual ant is really just a machine. It’s like they’re running a program. This isn’t unique to ants, all insects are basically just machines in terms of their intelligence.
That program makes the ant want to do certain things. In some kinds of ants there are different “roles” they fill, so they generally want to do that. Let’s talk about an ant that hunts for food. It’s not relying on intel or scouting reports. It just moves in one direction for a while, then maybe changes direction, and keeps on going. If it finds food, it starts emitting a chemical called a “pheromone”. Other ants can “smell” the pheromone and it tells them “someone found food”.
The ant that found the food gets excited and starts backtracking back to its nest. Along the way it stops to leave pheromones behind that other ants can follow to the food. If it meets another ant, they do a little “dance” where they “smell” each other. If the new ant was looking for food, it “smells” the pheromone and starts following the trail the “finder” left. It also starts making the “found food” pheromone. As more and more ants meet, they transition towards getting the food. When the “finder” gets back to the nest, lots of ants “smell” the pheromone and start following the trail.
This can happen pretty fast because it’s hard to think about just how many ants there are and how much they spread around. Since ants “smell” each other as they randomly cross paths, often a bunch of ants start gathering around the food faster than the original ant makes it back to the nest. This makes it look like they have ways to communicate faster than they really do.
But individually they’re not really “smart”. They don’t have their own ideas and can’t really solve problems that aren’t in their genetic memory. Some ants can do cool things like form bridges over water, but that’s really just how their “program” handles when they find water when they’re trying to get somewhere. This is super hard to understand as a human because we, as a species, don’t have an awful lot of things that we just “know” genetically.
there is no intelligence. every ant follows very simple instructions, even the queen. It’s just that after millions of years of evolution, these instructions got refined into something that looks like intelligent behavior.
E.g. instructions for food gathering:
1. Go exploring, and leave a trail of “chemicals”.
2. If tired (or it is getting dark), follow your own trail back to home.
3. If found food, take a piece of it back home, and mark trail with “food!!!” chemicals
4. If found somebody else’s trail of “food!!!” chemicals, follow it.
But ants cannot change their instructions , and they can look very dumb in un-natural circumstances. E.g. ants will continue to bring poisoned food into the nest, because they need food to replace the dying ants, and they do not realize that ants started dying after they discovered this new food source.
They are super smart and use their antennas to receive signals from the queen. Essentially a giant ‘hive mind’.
Latest Answers