No ant directs the behavior of any other ant.

Ants never make more ants colonies make more colonies.

Ant

Now ants most ants, including these, don't see very well.

The nest maintenance workers become foragers.

Ant

Like I just said, if there is more food to collect, the patrollers, the midden workers, the nest maintenance workers will all change to forage.

Does it matter to the foragers what the nest maintenance workers are doing?

Does it matter to the midden workers what the patrollers are doing?

Each ant, then, as it comes back in, is contacting other ants.

So that's only about 25 percent of the colony, and they're the oldest ants.

But in a small colony, it's likely to meet fewer foragers, just because there are fewer other foragers there to meet.

When one ant touches another, it's smelling it, and it can tell, for example, whether the other ant is a nest mate because ants cover themselves and each other, through grooming, with a layer of grease, which carries a colony specific odor.

Ant size

Ants count

Fish count

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Draw ants

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You eat ants?

So it starts out with zero ants, just the founding queen, and it grows to a size of about 10 or 12 thousand ants when the colony is five.

And they do that by each year sending out the reproductives those are the ones with wings on a mating flight.

So, the ants in the older colony that seem to be more stable are not any older than the ants in the younger colony.

So it has to know the difference between a forager and a nest maintenance worker.

The ant isn't alone.

E.O. Wilson once told me that when he looked at ants he loved them, of course, and he wanted to learn more about them he consciously looked at them from the standpoint of scale.

But the idea is that the ants are in there, and each ant is experiencing a certain flow of ants past it a stream of contacts with other ants.

One of the reasons I tell you about ants is because of my husband, who is in fact an ant taxonomist and when we got married, he promised to name an ant after me, which he did Procryptocerus nalini, a canopy ant.

So for example, if I put out extra food, everybody else the midden workers stop doing midden work and go get the food, they become foragers.

And they sort of stand as a buffer in between the ants working deep inside the nest and the ants working outside.

But if more nest maintenance work is needed for example, if I put out a bunch of toothpicks then nobody will ever switch back to nest maintenance, they have to get nest maintenance workers from inside the nest.

The first is that the experience of the ant of each ant can't be very predictable.

The patrollers become foragers.

The simplest idea is that when an ant is in a small colony and an ant in a large colony can use the same rule, like I expect to meet another forager every three seconds.

And these four groups are just the ants outside the nest.

And the ants that are waiting just inside the nest entrance to decide whether to go out on their next trip, are contacting the ants coming in.

A lot of people talk about ants.

In ant hills.

Redant hills.

Ants are a classic example workers work for queens and queens work for workers.

She lays eggs, she feeds the larvae so an ant starts as an egg, then it's a larva.

And it's when they reach this stable size, in numbers of ants, that they start to reproduce.

And I thought, These ants, are they looking for the queen ant?

Because the rate at which ants come back depends on all the little things that happen to an ant as it goes out and does its task outside.