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[OhNoNotAgain]

Even if someone posted this link already, it's worth posting again.

Covering info from related to the recent posting of a video of Gigantiops destructor reading road signs, to a recent Facebook discussion of the circular "ant mills" or "death spirals" in army ants, to how older ants teach younger ants where to find food, to the experiment with shortening desert ants' legs....

 

It's all mentioned in this very nice Quora article by Ted Pavlic, a social insect research scientist.

 

https://www.quora.co...olony-accept-it

 

In answer to: "What happens to an ant that gets lost? If it loses a pheromone trail, will the ant keep trying to find it again till it dies? Is it hard coded for survival without the backing of its colonial cousins? Will a new colony accept it?"

 

 

Small excerpt with fun trivia:

 

"...Pachycondyla also have a strange behavior sometimes called "tandem carrying" where a worker can be carried to a food source and then can find her way back to her home nest without any chemical trails. So she managed to learn the path between the nest and food despite having been carried the whole way -- facing backward!"

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, October 27 2020 - 8:02 PM.

[OhNoNotAgain]

Here's another interesting Quora article by Ted Pavlic.

 

https://www.quora.co...sonal-arguments

 

Excerpts:

 

About Atta: "Inside the colony, nestmates aggressively maintain territories beyond which those that have had contact with garbage cannot pass. This aggression helps prevent contamination of the fungus."

 

About oligonyny: "Consequently, the workers will manage the queens to keep them from meeting each other. The unrelated workers tolerate each other and manage the aggression between the unrelated queens."