If you mess up with even a single ant , you ’re enter a world of trouble . Ants memorise the smell of their enemies , and even just a handful of attacked ants will pass on this cognition to the rest of the colony .
That ’s the finding of researchers at the University of Melbourne , who test the memory potentiality of the tropic weaver ant . This peculiar mintage lives in tree - establish colonies of up to 500,000 pismire . The researcher took an emmet from one particular nest and had it spend fourth dimension in proximity with strange ant from other nest . After a crew of these trials , the ant was returned to its home nest , where it apparently continue to severalise all its fellow emmet that there were foreign foe ant on the sluttish , and they had better be on their safety .
That forewarning was put to good use when the research worker took twenty ants from elsewhere and place these “ invaders ” in the nest . The colony immediately attacked the strangers . avowedly , ants are fairly mistrustful by nature , and nonresistant to attack any apparent invaders , but the researchers observed they were far more aggressive in fighting those that one or a few of their members had antecedently encounter . Word – or , in this case , knowledge of the enemy ’s particular odor – had circularize to the repose of the dependency , which the research worker call a kind of “ collective wisdom . ” Head researcher Mark Elgar explained to BBC News how this wisdom spreads by using an oh so British analogy :
“ You have had an unsavory experience with a special group of people with a distinguishing feature – perhaps they all wear the same colored scarf of their football squad . And you warned your colleagues to face out for people wearing that colorful scarf . One of the colleagues that heard you might later on tell another co-worker who was n’t in the room when you made your comment . That colleague has acquired the information indirectly from the collective memory of you and your work colleagues . Change colleagues to ants , and scarf color to odor and you ’ve got our fib . ”
Original paper atNaturwissenschaften . ViaBBC News . Image by Polandeze onFlickr .
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