@Em Honestly the one that got me interested in ants in the first place: that some queens live for up to thirty years- A colony may be very old!
-
@Em Honestly the one that got me interested in ants in the first place: that some queens live for up to thirty years- A colony may be very old! It made me wonder what the colony *learns* and encodes in their macro-structure over such time spans. After all, the shape of a nest, their trails and farms, the composition of worker types, the memories and experiences of every ant in a colony of tens of thousands stores information. As do human cities… but I’m getting ahead of myself again.
@Em The “evolutionary unit” of ants is both the individual and the colony so both have patterns worth studying— you can’t really know a species of ant until you see how they move and interact— how the simple choices and tendencies of individuals create these far more complex macro patterns— and if a queen can live for decades that is a lot of time to build such complexity.
-
@Em The “evolutionary unit” of ants is both the individual and the colony so both have patterns worth studying— you can’t really know a species of ant until you see how they move and interact— how the simple choices and tendencies of individuals create these far more complex macro patterns— and if a queen can live for decades that is a lot of time to build such complexity.
@futurebird @Em this is going to prompt me to read a bit about ant genetics. I might need to follow this up!
-
@futurebird @Em this is going to prompt me to read a bit about ant genetics. I might need to follow this up!
@patrickhadfield @Em Here is a good lit summary of the wild ride that is ant sex.
Basically, if you only mate once but then need to have hundreds of thousands of kids for decades things get a little wild.
https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/images/9/94/Baer%2C_B._2011._The_copulation_biology_of_ants.pdf
-
@futurebird @Em this is going to prompt me to read a bit about ant genetics. I might need to follow this up!
Also, in many animals we think of mate selection and generations as discrete. The fitness of the eggs a frog lays doesn’t have an impact on if the frog will be successful— for social species fit offspring determine if the colony will ever make it long enough to produce sexual offspring at all. Your kids determine if you even reach sexual maturity (sounds like a paradox almost) So, there are pressures that work on multiple generations.
-
Also, in many animals we think of mate selection and generations as discrete. The fitness of the eggs a frog lays doesn’t have an impact on if the frog will be successful— for social species fit offspring determine if the colony will ever make it long enough to produce sexual offspring at all. Your kids determine if you even reach sexual maturity (sounds like a paradox almost) So, there are pressures that work on multiple generations.
@futurebird Social insects are SO WEIRD!!! Are they a single animal, or are they individuals? Both? Neither? Where does the generational divide really happen? Is it between Queen and alete or worker and alete?
If ever I think does my life really have to be like this, all I have to do is look at ants or bees and be like, nope, not at all.
-
@patrickhadfield @Em Here is a good lit summary of the wild ride that is ant sex.
Basically, if you only mate once but then need to have hundreds of thousands of kids for decades things get a little wild.
https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/images/9/94/Baer%2C_B._2011._The_copulation_biology_of_ants.pdf
@futurebird @Em that's kind of what I was wondering - the evolutionary pressures on different parts of the nest. But I haven't thought it through (and I haven't thought hard about evolution and selection in a long while!).
-
@futurebird @Em that's kind of what I was wondering - the evolutionary pressures on different parts of the nest. But I haven't thought it through (and I haven't thought hard about evolution and selection in a long while!).
Well thinking about ant evolution is one heck of dive into the deep end! (but IMO all the best questions lurk with the ants and maybe also the #lichen ) #ants #evolution
-
@Em The “evolutionary unit” of ants is both the individual and the colony so both have patterns worth studying— you can’t really know a species of ant until you see how they move and interact— how the simple choices and tendencies of individuals create these far more complex macro patterns— and if a queen can live for decades that is a lot of time to build such complexity.
@futurebird @Em Would you recommend some reading on this, at say an undergrad zoology level?
-
@futurebird @Em Would you recommend some reading on this, at say an undergrad zoology level?
This paper was readable IMO. I'm not an ant PhD or anything. Just a fan.
https://www.antwiki.org/wiki/images/9/94/Baer%2C_B._2011._The_copulation_biology_of_ants.pdf
-
@Em The “evolutionary unit” of ants is both the individual and the colony so both have patterns worth studying— you can’t really know a species of ant until you see how they move and interact— how the simple choices and tendencies of individuals create these far more complex macro patterns— and if a queen can live for decades that is a lot of time to build such complexity.
@futurebird @Em back in the 90s there was a lot of interest in generating complex structures and behaviors from the simplest possible rules programmed into simulated ants. Most of my experiments have gone, lost on long-abandoned hard drives, but it was a lot of fun, and very instructive. I gave one group a whole bunch of phobias, and they ended up assembling themselves into four-layer pyramids.
This is a different type of experiment in the same vein, where a few different strains of "ants" follow instructions encoded into "DNA". The ants with the highest energy levels breed and create offspring with merged DNA. Usually they all die out, but sometimes after a series of population crashes a stable colony is established with a dominant ant species.
GitHub - geekbrit/ignatius: "Ants" experiments - see the Predation branch for a more complex ecosystem
"Ants" experiments - see the Predation branch for a more complex ecosystem - geekbrit/ignatius
GitHub (github.com)
The code is a 2012 rewrite in Python of my 1995 original, but might inspire new experiments.
