are the individual ants smart or is it the queen or do they like combine intelligence or something
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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.
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