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Science

Ants Use Scents Like Road Signs 43

Posted by samzenpus from the I-use-a-similar-method-to-gaurd-my-office dept.
Ant writes "Animal Planet mentions ants scouting for food place a tiny scent marker on branches that do not lead to a reward. This was according to a study published on Thursday in Nature, the weekly British science weekly. The pheromone acts like a "no entry signal" to other ants, telling them not to waste their time going down that route, it says. The discovery was made by animal scientists at Britain's University of Sheffield. Seen in The Ant Farm's and Myrmecology's Message Board forum thread."
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Ants Use Scents Like Road Signs More

Ants Use Scents Like Road Signs

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  • Ant (Score:5, Funny)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2005 @10:39PM (#14153504) Homepage
    How to confuse a line of ants.

    0) Locate ants. This part is important.

    1) Lick a finger. Normally yours, but hey if you talk somebody into it, go forth and conquer.

    2) Draw the moistened digit (which sounds way worse than it is) perpendicularly across the ant trail.

    3) Watch in amusement as the ants wander around in a confused crowd, trying to regain the trail.

    4) Have a brief existential crisis regarding if the Universe wipes a moistened digit across humanity from time to time.

    5) ...

    6) Profit!
    • Currently living in Thailand, ants are very plentiful. I think I'll be trying this very soon! :)

      • Re:Ant (Score:3, Interesting)

        by I(rispee_I(reme ( 310391 )
        Currently living in Thailand, ants are very plentiful.

         
        They're that way everywhere, except Antarctica.
        I hear that Sydney, Australia is one giant anthill
        underneath, due to an invading foreign ant species.
        I will leave the alien ant overlord joke to the first
        reply.

    • 4) Have a brief existential crisis regarding if the Universe wipes a moistened digit across humanity from time to time.

      Might I be so bold as to suggest that religion and politics are prime examples of this principle at work.

    • This works for considerably longer if you use a bit of soap and water and a brush. Then try painting circles around the critters and watch them really freak out. Eventually they'll get so agitated they just cross the circle in random directions and continue darting about at double speed for a considerable time afterward.

      Mal-2

  • Feynmans Ants (Score:4, Informative)

    by Midnight Warrior ( 32619 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2005 @10:40PM (#14153512) Homepage
    Why is this new? Richard Feynman talked about ants long time ago [mathpages.com]. Even as far back as when he was a kid, as he discusses in his book Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman [gorgorat.com] (which has the text of the book, and this section, about 1/3 of the way down). First non-lamer post.

    • Re:Feynmans Ants (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dorkygeek ( 898295 )
      I have not read the complete material from the links you posted, but it looks like Feynman thought that bad trails could be distinguished by a fewer quantity of the scent as ants would leave on a successful trail. The article although seems to indicate that ants use a *different* marker to signal bad trails.

    • Re:Feynmans Ants (Score:3, Informative)

      by Vellmont ( 569020 )
      Because they've discovered that ants not only leave "follow me" trails, but also "don't follow me" trails. Feynman only found evidence for the "follow me" trails, which I'd guess had been known about for a while.

    • Why it's new (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Ant scent trails are old news. It's well understood how they work on the ground. Ant trails on the ground are like roads or paths... they're a line the ants follow. The line has coded patterns of data, but fundamentally the information about where to go is just an analog line on a surface.

      This is a different thing. These scents are being used as markers indicating which branches on a tree shoudn't be explored further. It turns the tree into a literal tree data structure! This is wonderful. The data about wh

    • Re:Feynmans Ants (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This is also a basis for a hueristic used to solve the travelling salesman problem.

  • do they ever lie? (Score:3, Funny)

    by squarefish ( 561836 ) * on Wednesday November 30, 2005 @10:44PM (#14153553)
    so that they can have their own private stash?
    I would!!!
    • I think this would be a little more thinking than an ant could handle.

      But, I could be wrong.

      • Re:do they ever lie? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by panthro ( 552708 )
        Not at all. Varyingly complex behaviour designed to fool other animals (same or different species) is instinctive and genetic in many species. However, ants are much more socially dependent than most animals and would not benefit from stashing food for themselves individually.

        It would be interesting to see if they put such "do not enter" markers on the far side of food locations, near the interface with another competing colony. My guess is the ants can distinguish the originating colony of the pheromones,
    • No, because individual worker ants do not reproduce. A colony whose ants did this would be worse off, so such traits would be selected against.
  • This story stinks!
  • What is this doing on slashdot?
    • Maybe it's just me, but as a programmer, I have often thought that it should be conceptually easy to write a program that simulates an ant, since there cannot be much to an ant. Certainly not much sophisticated processing ability.

      Yet it seems surprisingly difficult.

      One possible conclusion is that the step-wise algorithmic programming models we use add far more complexity to certain problems, such as simulating ant behavior.

      This revelation about negative scent markers helps me understand ants better, and ma

      • Re:Something to see (Score:4, Insightful)

        by panthro ( 552708 ) <mavrinacNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday December 01, 2005 @12:55PM (#14158577) Homepage

        ...since there cannot be much to an ant. Certainly not much sophisticated processing ability.

        Why do people automatically assume that ants, and for that matter, other non-human animals, are simple and/or dumb and/or not self-aware? It seems this idea that humans are so tremendously much more complex than any other organism sprouts from thin air (or thick ego), and it would take a dolphin obtaining a Ph.D. in particle physics to convince them otherwise.

        At least, it suggests that ant behavior is not as simple as I had thought.

        Probably not. Our behaviour is as complex as it is mainly due to the degree of social interaction inherent to our species. Now, show me an ant, and I will show you a social creature if there ever was any.

  • Sounds good (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CXI ( 46706 ) on Wednesday November 30, 2005 @11:09PM (#14153724) Homepage
    When can I get it in a spray can?
  • Of SimAnt!
  • I thought we'd known this for awhile. Wasn't it the basis for some of the swarming algorithms we've been using for awhile?
  • Could the scent be synthesized and used as a way to tell ants not to bother entering a house?
  • The RAID traps I used this last summer didn't work well. I wonder when someone will formulate a sprayable "do not enter" chemical as an alternative to poisons. Then how long will it take for ants to evolve an adaptation to ignore false "do not enter" signs?
    • Forever, if the chemicals are produced from live(->dead) ants. probably easiest/cheapest source too.

    • Re:Better than RAID poison? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There's probably not much of an evolutionary advantage to being able to go inside houses. Once inside, people generally kill them (the kind of person who would buy the spray in the first place...).

      Ants do not evolve at anywhere approaching the same rate as bacteria, either. The generation time is MUCH higher. Also, they can't share genes between species as easily as bacteria (although it's possible), so the same mutation can't jump from species to species like antibiotic resistance can in bacteria.
    • I have a LOT of experience with ants ... you have to find out what your ants like. There are different kinds of ants, sugar ants and grease ants. Leave sugar and (dry) dog food and see what the ants eat. Once you've got a bunch of ants, give them different types of traps to see which one they'll eat. I have had the best luck with "Grants Ant Traps". They are arsenic suspended in a sortof a jelly which poisions their food supply. Once you've got these ant trails, follow them back to their source and dig
  • Hell, I learned all this stuff from SimAnt over 10 years ago!
  • Not all that new thing. They do. And remains of a dead ant work about the same way. So if you want them to forbid entry to some place, if there's an estabilished "road", stream of ants, too late, you need to use some mass destructiom chemical weapons. But if you see a single ant scout, smash it and smear it over the likely road, it will quite effectively stop other ants from, say, climbing the garden table legs.
    • Speaking of dead ants. I once got a ton of them coming from a crack along where the tub meets the floor.

      So I put out some ant traps and noticed something that seemed odd, at least to me.

      As they started dying, the started stacking the bodies in small piles along lines that ran diagonal to the floor tiles. It looked like a point grid. Fairly evenly spaced as well

      I know they are just ants, but I actually started feeling pretty guilty when the few that were left were just hauling the corpses of the others, unti

  • Anyone remember SimAnt? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @03:14AM (#14154994) Journal
    Does anybody remember the early 90s computer game SimAnt [wikipedia.org]? Basically, you got to control an entire 2D ant colony. You didn't directly control all of the individual ants, but instead controlled a single ant which dropped pheremones on the ground, which other ants would follow. For example, you could leave a food pheremone trail leading to a food source, and as long as your fellow ants kept on finding food there, they would add their own pheremones on the trip back to sustain the trail.

    It would have been handy to have a "no entry" pheremone in that game. Now that I think of it, SimAnt is a game which is just screaming to have an open-source remake. Somebody with more spare time than me should make such a remake, and add the newly discovered pheremone. :)
    • Well, there WAS a "warning" pheromone. You were supposed to spray it around dangerous places. It just meant "stay away". Since the game wasn't on branches but on ground, the "no entry" pheromone made less sense.
      Anyway, get the first colony somewhat running, just mark the first food supply, then change the profile of egg production so that all 3 classes are produced in equal amounts, not the default queens being just a small percent, then go to the macromanagement map and start spreading the queens all over

  • The pheromone acts like a "no entry signal" to other ants, telling them not to waste their time going down that route, it says.

    I wish someone sprayed that pheromone on my ex's ankles before I met her.

  • neat. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by David_Shultz ( 750615 )
    Many of us are no doubt familiar with models of ant foraging behavior that make use of pheremone dropping. For those of you who didn't catch the important difference mentioned here, it's basically the discovery of a different type of pheremone (whereas previously we had imagined that the ants made use of only two pheremones 'home' and 'food' -now there is 'no food').

    if you are interested in such a model, you can get a simple one programmed in python here: http://www.carleton.ca/ics/courses/cgsc5001/assign [carleton.ca]

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