quotations about ants
Humans aren't the only species that can be notoriously lazy. A new study with ants shows some spend the majority of their time in a consistent state of rest. The findings even suggest inactivity may have evolved as an adaptive behavior.
RAYMOND SANCHEZ
"Some Ants Are Lucky: Their Job Is Being Lazy", Futurity, September 23, 2015
Ants are everywhere, but only occasionally noticed. They run much of the terrestrial world as the premier soil turners, channelers of energy, dominatrices of the insect fauna--yet receive only passing mention in textbooks on ecology. They employ the most complex forms of chemical communication of any animals and their social organization provides an illuminating contrast to that of human beings, but not one biologist in a hundred can describe the life cycle of any species. The neglect of ants in science and natural history is a shortcoming that should be remedied, for they represent the culmination of insect evolution, in the same sense that human beings represent the summit of vertebrate evolution.
BERT HOLLDOBLER
The Ants
Fire ants may be painful when they bite (and are terrible news for homeowners), but you have to give them credit: They're survivors. Facing biblical rains and historic flooding in South Carolina this week, giant rafts of fire ants have been spotted floating together in roving ant islands. This behavior allows entire colonies of fire ants to survive the floods, provided they can find dry land within a few days.
ANDREW FREEDMAN
"Giant rafts of fire ants are somehow surviving South Carolina floods", Mashable, October 6, 2015
Ants are kind of amazing in this way if you think about it. They don't have bosses or leaders, or corporate structures or hierarchy. They don't procrastinate. They don't need deadlines. There is no top-down organization. And the normal bottom-up drivers of individual behavior--the itch to reproduce and the instinct for self-preservation--don't provide a tidy explanation for the motivation of ants either. The worker ants are all sterile females that can't reproduce, and self-preservation obviously isn't a priority, because they will sacrifice their lives to improve the fitness of the colony. A few workers of a Brazilian species, for instance, doom themselves to certain death each night by staying outside to seal up the entrance to the nest.
NATHANAEL JOHNSON
Unseen City
Shreya Darji's problems began last August. For no apparent reason, her head felt weird. After a few days of ringing in her ears, along with redness, her parents took her to the hospital. Upon examining her, doctors found ants in her ear canal. At first, the physicians removed a few dead ants and figured that was the end of the problem. But for the family from the state of Gujarat, in western India, the issue was just beginning. Even after the doctors removed the dead ants, Shreya was experiencing around ten live ants per day crawling out of her ears. More often than not, these insect appearances happened during school hours, leading her classmates to give her the nickname 'Queen of the Ants.'
PAMMY LIN
"Girl Feels No Pain As Thousands Of Ants Live Inside Her Head", Weird Asia News, March 6, 2016
A characteristic of insect societies such as ants is the way tasks are distributed among group members. Not only queens and worker ants have clearly defined responsibilities but the workers themselves also have particular jobs to do when, for example, it comes to the care of the young, defense, and nest building activities. It is widely assumed that this division of labor is an essential factor that determines the success of such social groups. According to this view, a high degree of specialization provides advantages because the individual tasks are performed better and more effectively. It seems, however, that this advantage may actually be a great disadvantage in special circumstances. As researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have discovered, highly specialized ants lack the flexibility to adapt to new situations--with serious consequences for the entire colony.
UNIVERSITAET MAINZ
"Ant colonies that are highly specialized have lower chances of survival when sudden changes occur", Phys Org, March 8, 2016
Any other New York City restaurant would've been shut down for bug infestation, but The Black Ant restaurant in The East Village is gleefully in business. More so, the bugs are on the menu. The little black dots sprinkled over the signature guacamole are neither beans nor peppercorns. They're chicatanas, black Mexican ants hand-caught in Oaxaca, roasted with garlic and chili and ground into a special black ant spice. Still hungry? Then add a side of chapulines, or grasshoppers, to your guacamole for only eight bucks.
LINA ZELDOVICH
"Would you like some ants with that?", Boston Globe, March 11, 2016
Ants do what other ants are doing. If an ant encounters a lot of other ants returning with food, she too will go out and gather food. If food is plentiful, it will be easy to find and ants will return faster with food. That will encourage other ants to seek food as well. If food is scarce or if there is a predator about, few ants will return with food. If few ants are returning with food other ants will not go out venturing for food and hence, not encounter the predator. Hence, ants doing what other ants are doing leads to productive behaviour for the colony of ants, most of the times.
JOHN H. MILLER
"Why Engineers and MBAs Become Sweepers and Peons", Bangalore Mirror, March 1, 2016
The behaviour of ants is often anti-human. We create waste; they move away plenty of man-made and natural waste and use it for sustenance and building. Their colonies have intricate patterns, channels and chambers that help aerate soil.... They are great 'ecosystem engineers'.
TARA RACHEL THOMAS
"Getting all antsy", Hindu Business Online, March 11, 2016
Ant colonies are remarkably similar to cities. No one choreographs the action, not even the queen ant, but ant behavior is controlled by swarm logic--put 10,000 dumb ants together, and they become smart.
ALEX CUKAN
"Stories of Modern Science", United Press International, Oct. 8, 2001
Ants are everywhere. If you picked up 100 arthropods in a rainforest, 94 of them would be ants.
SHAENA MONTANARI
"Ancient Ant Attack In Amber Reveals Clues About Earliest Social Societies", Forbes, February 19, 2016
There's a new ant-agonist on the pesticide market. According to a review published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, trees protected by weaver ants have less pests, less plant damage, and show an increased yield when compared to trees sprayed with pesticides. The small, red tree dwellers are also cheaper to use and better for the environment. What makes the weaver ants so effective is their ability to quickly respond and attack larger intruders. They're categorized as a "superorganism," which means that the colony functions like one organism, with individual ants acting as its cells and moving around independently. When an intruder enters their environment, the ants coordinate attacks via pheromones before taking the insect back to their nests of woven leaves to feed the colony. With the crops hanging so close to the nests, they fall under the ants' protection.
WALT BONNER
"Ants are safer, more effective than pesticides, study says", FOX News, September 10, 2015
The tiny ant dares to enter the lion's ear.
ARMENIAN PROVERB
I read up on ant colony algorithms -- route optimisation techniques in use across industries today that are based on ants and their food-finding missions. Pheromone scents evaporate over time, wiping away the short routes. Other ants sense this and eventually end up in the long lines we see, foraging for food in their deceptively haphazard but orderly manner. No matter the size, blind ants solved our logistical issues centuries before we even knew we had them.
TARA RACHEL THOMAS
"Getting all antsy", Hindu Business Online, March 11, 2016
Ants are nothing if not ubiquitous. Venture a few steps into any woodland and there you will find a nest with all its denizens busying about. In springtime and more especially in summer, some crumbs of food or grains of sugar left lying on a draining-board will soon be visited by a long procession of tiny black creatures, scurrying along one after the other, intent on making off with an unexpected hoard of nourishment. Ants, in all their minuteness and their teeming numbers, are just part of the background.
LAURENT KELLER & ELISABETH GORDON
The Lives of Ants
An ant is a wise creature for itself, but it is a shrewd thing, in an orchard or garden.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Wisdom For A Man's Self", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
Ants are bizarrely unlike people, and yet there's a hint of human behavior at work in ant colonies. They are just strange enough, while also being similar enough, to prick the imagination. This has led thinkers throughout history to compare ants to people. Why aren't we more like them? Or are we actually more akin to ants than we'd like to believe?
NATHANAEL JOHNSON
Unseen City
I had the great idea of using markers to gently color the ants so I could tell them apart, but I learned that this is exactly like somebody trying to gently color on you with a thirty-story building. Without dwelling on the tragedy, I'd just like to say that I'm deeply sorry to Mr. Purple and the surviving Purple family.
JIM BENTON
Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers
Ants and bees have reputations as efficient team players. In Temnothorax rugatulus--a small brown ant found in pine forests in North America--division of labor is common, with workers specializing in tasks like foraging, building, and brood care. But new research shows that many ants in a colony seem to specialize in doing nothing at all. To get a closer look at how these ants filled their time, researchers marked every member of five lab-based colonies with dots of colored paint. Over the course of 2 weeks, a high-definition camera recorded 5-minute segments of the ants in action six times a day, capturing their behavior (or lack thereof). Out of the "workers," 71.9% were inactive at least half the time, and 25.1% were never seen working. A small fraction of the ants, just 2.6%, were always active during observation, the researchers wrote last month in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Previous studies have postulated that inactivity might be temporary, with ants working in shifts dictated by circadian rhythm. But the new results show that the lazy workers stay lazy no matter the time of day. According to the team, this suggests that inactivity isn't merely a break between tasks, but might be an important part of the ants' division of labor. Just what part remains unclear.
DAVID SHULTZ
"Most worker ants are slackers", Science Mag, October 6, 2015
We humans like to think that we run the world. But even in the heart of our great cities, a rival superpower thrives: the ants. These tiny creatures live all around us in vast numbers, though we hardly even notice them. But in many ways, it is they who really run the show. When ants march together, little can stand in their way. Some ten thousand types are known. They outnumber us a million to one, and the total weight of ants matches that of the entire human race. But could these insect societies really have the edge on us?
BILL MASON
"Little Creatures Who Run the World", NOVA, Aug. 12, 1997