Ants Smell Cheaters

thepismire — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:15:52 +0000

I found this story on Digg, but researchers have found a way that ants keep their society in check. From the article, it says that workers ants which are essentially daughters of the queen have the ability to reproduce if necessary without a male. This happens when a colony loses a queen. During this process, the ants give off a specific pheremone. However, when researchers put the pheremone on a ant within a colony with a queen, the other worker ants promptly attacked it. This reaction was not observed with any other pheremone that they tried. I guess it’s a form of preventing the worker ants to reproduce and to keep the colony population in check.

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Ant Traffic Control

thepismire — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:49:06 +0000

Wow, what can’t ants teach us. A new study shows some insight into traffic control, and congestion prevention by observing how ants handle congestion. When the ants were forced onto a narrow pathway causing congestion toward a food source, the ants in traffic would push the returning ants off the path so that they create a new one to ease the congestion. This was intentional since this behavior was not seen when there was no congestion. The ants would always create different routes if they felt there was a traffic jam to keep everything efficient.

He said that while you cannot allow cars to collide with vehicles coming in the opposite direction as a form of traffic control, you could do the next best thing and allow them to communicate.

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thepismire » ants

Ants Smell Cheaters

Ant Traffic Control