Breakpoint_Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain by Jeff Stibel

Author:Jeff Stibel [Stibel, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2013-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

Nine

Pheromones | Language | Mirrors

Despite their minimal brainpower and inability to speak, ants are remarkably good at communicating, which they do automatically through scent. Their bodies are covered in a greasy layer called cuticular hydrocarbon, and each ant carries a unique cuticular hydrocarbon pheromone, or scent, that is specific to the colony. When an ant encounters another ant, she touches her antennae to the other ant’s antennae or body, and she can instantly determine whether the ant is part of her own colony. If she finds that the other ant is a nestmate, she investigates further and can smell where the ant has been, what task the ant is currently performing, and, in some cases, what the ant has eaten recently.

Ants come in contact with many nestmates throughout the course of the day. The patterns of a particular ant’s interactions largely determine what task, if any, she decides to perform. When foraging, an ant follows scent trails left by other ants to know which direction to go and to predict how good the food will be. When ants encounter high-quality food, they leave a stronger scent trail, thus encouraging other ants to follow the same trail and bring back more of the good stuff.

Ants have a much more acute sense of smell than do other insects. A new study by biologist Laurence Zwiebel at Vanderbilt University mapped out a typical ant olfactory system and found that they have 400 different olfactory receptors. This is a huge number for an insect; honeybees have fewer than 200, and fruit flies have a paltry 61 of these odor-detecting proteins. “It’s a reasonable supposition,” says Dr. Zwiebel, “that this dramatic expansion in odor-sensing capability is what allowed ants to develop such a high level of social organization.”

The nuances of scent are vital to the survival of ant colonies. In fact, if you want to fool an ant colony, all you have to do is have the right scent. One type of jumping spider has evolved a unique survival strategy: they copy the scent of a particular colony and walk right into the nest. They steal larvae right under the ants’ noses, which don’t detect intruders that have replicated the colony scent.

Perhaps most interesting to study are the interactions between ants from different colonies. Most often, they avoid each other at all costs. As Deborah Gordon puts it, “Ants sometimes look like they jump apart after an encounter with an ant that is not a nestmate, recoiling from the unfamiliar smell.” If a harvester ant meets ants from a different colony while foraging, she heads in the other direction immediately. She does not lay down a scent trail on her way home, which keeps other nestmates from heading in the direction of the foreign ants.

Harvester ants generally don’t fight, but “there seem to be seasonal bursts of fighting, often just after the summer rains,” says Dr. Gordon. “Maybe the rain washes away chemical signals on the ground, such as colony-specific cuticular hydrocarbons, and the absence of those signals stimulates fighting.

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