A few years ago, Frank was working at a field station in the Ivory Coast when he noticed that some of the ants marching home after battle weren't carrying termites. Instead, they were carrying other ants.

    "And I was wondering, 'What exactly was going on there? Why were they carrying some of the ants?'" he recalls.

    It turns out, those transported ants weren't dead — they were injured.



OftenBen:

And they don't eat them? That's really fucking cool.

That's a really complex behavior, even if we take into account that complex behavior routinely arises from systems of relatively 'simple' agents. Because it's so much more than 'return invested biomass to the colony,' I wonder how such a trait developed. What kind of selective pressure was put on the ants to develop such a behavior?


posted 2568 days ago