Abstract
In this chapter, I introduce the basics of ant foraging behavior. Then, I describe our experiments based on an inexpensive system for quantitative and automated data collection to study foraging ants, applied to the case of the Cuban leaf-cutter species called bibijagua. The foraging dynamics is interpreted in terms of a mathematical model proposed by Swedish colleagues, suggesting that our ants “collectively adjust” their foraging activity in order to work “at the onset of chaos”. Then, I present our experiments of perturbing foraging ants by abduction. From them, we conclude that foraging ants do not pass danger information to nestmates along relatively large distances, which provokes the “sacrifice” of many individuals. Finally, I describe our study on how ants escape from a closed arena with two symmetrical exits. In normal conditions, they equally use both doors. However, if panic is induced by a chemical, individuals tend to agglomerate on one of the exits, which substantially delays the evacuation. In a word, ants are collectively smart... if their natural environment is not excessively perturbed: a little bit like humans.
What can we learn of moral value from the ants?
Nothing. Nothing at all can be learned from ants
that our species should even consider imitating.
Edward O. Wilson
in “The Meaning of Human Existence” (Liveright Publishing, 2014)
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- 1.
Or Alley of Chinchiquirá, but also called Callejón del Coco (Alley of the Coconut), and finally renamed as Francisco Pedersen street by the 1960s.
- 2.
Tú podrías enseñar piano y lectura, y español tal vez […] y una clase de geografía, que fuese más geografía física que de nombres […] y una clase de ciencias […]. Para esa clase ayudarían mucho un libro de Arabella Buckley, que se llama “The Fairy-Land of Science”, y los libros de John Lubbock, sobre todo dos, “Fruits, Flowers and Leaves” y “Ants, Bees and Wasps”. (Taken from José Martí, “Carta a María Mantilla, 9 de abril de 1895”. Obras completas, tomo 5, pag 145, Editorial Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, 1975).
- 3.
This mechanism was actually demonstrated by Sir John Lubbock himself.
- 4.
This cast some doubts on the “textbook” idea that ants start their foraging day by performing random walks in the search for food. Our observations of A. insularis suggest that this may be the scenario when the food area is identified for the first time: after that, ants will be collecting vegetal material in the same place for months on end.
- 5.
In Córdoba, Argentina, I’ve seen ants that look exactly the same as A. insularis, and whose foraging activities (taking place along the grass separator between two lanes of a highway) look exactly the same—at least in my simplifying physicist’s mind. Moreover, I have picked ants up from the ground that look exactly the same to me in the campus of the University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil.
- 6.
Tú sabes más que las bibijaguas, in Spanish.
- 7.
The experiments have been performed on other ant species, and the “internal period of activity” measured is of the order of 3 h (Boi et al. 1999).
- 8.
So, our sensor was unable to distinguish between ants going in or out of the nest… but nothing is perfect in this life.
- 9.
At some point, my students found a nice garden full of bibijaguas at the fancy beach of “Varadero” (more than 150 km east of Havana), but the measurements there never ended successfully: the competition with water sports and so on was too tough.
- 10.
Sometime after we saw a kid nearby flying a kite with a tail that looked suspiciously like it was made using our wire. But we didn’t do anything about it.
- 11.
Moreover, thanks to the library’s night guardian, nobody would get near the sensors—including, unfortunately, ourselves. But, if needed, our undergrad student Javier Fernández would stand on the curb outside the garden with his laptop, and download the precious data wirelessly.
- 12.
MASON is a Java Multi-Agent Simulation library created, coincidentally, at the George Mason University, USA.
- 13.
I was taking part in a project on complex materials headed by my colleague Tom Henning Johansen (University of Oslo).
- 14.
Notice that these parameters may describe, in a non-trivial way, the behavior and interactions among ants during foraging: pheromones, mutual antennation, body wiggling… all of it can be contained in \(k\) and \(k^{*}\)!
- 15.
Notice that it does not necessarily correspond to the activity of real ants… but we are boldly assuming so!
- 16.
However, to be chaotic in a rigorous way, one has to see whether the associated Lyapunov exponent grows fast enough.
- 17.
We used a discount vacuum cleaner I had acquired during my postdoc in Houston in 2000. The device—bought at a K-Mart store during a “sale fever”—had been resting uselessly at home until it rose up from the ashes more than a decade later like a kind of phoenix, and turned into a scientific instrument.
- 18.
Thanks to the fact that the cell floor is “carpeted” with filter paper, a circular spot of repellent is established at the center of the cell, which guarantees a symmetric scenario.
- 19.
In order to estimate the symmetry-breaking parameters, we had to extrapolate the data for one of the two doors up to the end of the experiment.
- 20.
Which is not very realistic from the biological point of view. But we should remember that our ants have already been approximated by circles!
- 21.
That would demand a pretty high level of intelligence for an ant, but we have to remember once again that this is just a mathematical model.
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An experiment showing the symmetry breaking in escaping ants http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rz8LNesxGs
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Altshuler, E. (2017). Smarter Than Bibijaguas. In: Guerrilla Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51624-0_8
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