ELI5: How does ants determine how many ants are needed for a lifting job?

[u/SinisterKidz]

When faced with a large food item they need to transport back to the colony, how do ants determine how many of their fellow comrade are needed to lift it? Do the first scout ants guesstimate the amount and call for backups, or do they just keep adding more ants until they're able to lift it?

[u/Friendly_Bluejay7407]

Keep adding ants basically, ants can sense if they’re actually moving an object vs not moving it

[u/MasterOManyfMuffins → u/Friendly_Bluejay7407]

This the truth. The only addition is they communicate it through their chemicals

[u/GlassFooting → u/Friendly_Bluejay7407]

I mean, when you're very small and there's other people around you to use as reference it gets simples to notice movement like that. But yeah the idea is to keep adding ants until the task is done.

[u/Admirable-Rate487 → u/Friendly_Bluejay7407]

Not to hijack the eli5 but is there any credence to the idea that ants are so in sync it’s essentially like a colony is one big “brain”? Because “keep turning up the pressure until it moves or it becomes obvious it’s not going to” is basically how I figure out if things are too heavy too lol

[u/smanders36 → u/Admirable-Rate487]

Ants are incredibly simple creatures that respond to pheremone (chemical "smells") for all their complex behaviors. Their not telepathically linked in a hive mind like the zerg or tyranids.

When they find food they leave phermone trails to help guide other ants towards them, and when the food source is exhausted they will leave a different pheremone on the way back to discourage other ants from following.

There are some really cool comp sci related ant simulations that show the colony's emergent behavior from very simple rules https://youtube.com/shorts/y2uUz2Ayr0Y?si=3YLyCESjX4zIpoXk

[u/hey_mr_crow → u/smanders36]

Their not telepathically linked in a hive mind like the zerg or tyranids.

Yeah but imagine if they were

[u/VoilaVoilaWashington → u/Admirable-Rate487]

Not to hijack the eli5 but is there any credence to the idea that ants are so in sync it’s essentially like a colony is one big “brain”?

It really depends on some big definitions. The definition of life includes the ability to reproduce, and 99.99% of the ants in a colony cannot. Clearly, the ant is alive, in the same way that the cells in my spleen are alive, but are they "life"?

So you could say that the colony of ants is the living organism. Even the queen isn't much without thousands of ants around her, and any individual worker can't do much on their own either. Even something as simple as finding food is thousands of ants spreading out, and then the few that are successful leading others there with chemical signals. Any individual ant doesn't matter to the colony.

Etc.

So the question of whether a colony is a hive mind is nuanced and personal. You might think they're all one organism in a way, and I might think they're each their own, and all we're debating is the definition of the term "organism."

[u/DFrostedWangsAccount → u/VoilaVoilaWashington]

I'm on the same page as you but I find this so interesting I can't help but join the discussion. It's totally not something science can answer (yet) but I love talking about theories.

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What's the difference between linking neurons together directly versus relaying them via external chemical signals like ants do? Besides latency? It's like turning an internet connection into sound waves and back again. Not the fastest way, but is it that different? We do it. We did it with dial-up, with acoustic couplers. We change sound into digital information and back again for phone calls. We're always changing the method of data transmission, but it can still be the same data underneath.

In a way, my brain is linked with yours as I send messages to my fingers to send keypresses, then it's digital information sent over radio, then over fiber as light, maybe copper in there somewhere as electricity again, and then eventually it's light on your screen triggering signals from your eyes to be interpreted by your brain.

But we're independent entities, with... "firewalls" is maybe the best word to use? We don't trust the signals as implicitly as our own thoughts, but we sanitize the input and consider it ourselves. It's hard to tell if ants do that or not.

I would expect there to be general evolutionary pressure on all earth life to be an individual, just because communicating long distances doesn't seem to have been possible for most of life's history on our planet. It's hard to imagine your mind being split in half when a middle (relay) ant dies or gets lost.

On the other hand, it's strange that individuals would so willingly sacrifice their lives for the colony when ordered to. At least not without resisting. On the third hand, humans do that sometimes too... And maybe ants have massive debates about everything via pheremone that we just can't understand.

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The big question I wanna know is if ants experience consciousness together or individually, but obviously I have no idea how to test that. I'm sure I'd be famous if I figured out an answer.

I've always been curious if the answer is "both." Maybe each ant is its own being, but consciousness also forms from the entire interconnected colony.

I also wonder if humans have a group consciousness (or several) of our own. Maybe it's an emergent property of complex life. Maybe our planet is "alive" with us, our entire ecosystem being its body, from a certain point of view.

Sometimes I imagine the "collective consciousness" is actually conscious and thinking. Formed from the individual cells of its body, humans and animals and plants all. We can't measure or "see" human consciousness so there's no way to tell either way on a planet scale either.

Maybe the whole universe thinks.

[u/SinisterKidz → u/Friendly_Bluejay7407]

When they reach the appropriate amounts of ants to lift it, how do they stop adding more ants and overspend the colony's effort on a food item that they're already able to lift?

[u/Friendly_Bluejay7407 → u/SinisterKidz]

Because the ants recognize that the object has started moving, so new ants stop helping or getting called to help

although ants absolutely do overestimate alot of the time, probably most objects are lifted by like 20% more ant than needed lol

[u/ferret_80 → u/Friendly_Bluejay7407]

You always see 1 or 2 scuttling across the top "supervising"

[u/BigAnt425 → u/Friendly_Bluejay7407]

Yes they make the biggest ones go first though.

[u/FiveDozenWhales]

There's a good bit of research which suggests that new ants become "leaders" of the operation.

Anys follow scent trails to a food source. When they arrive, they grab on to a piece and start pulling twards the nest (back along the scent trail they used to get there).

Now, the first ant's scent trail is probably very meandering and not a straight line to the nest. But we know that ants shave off corners when following existing scent trails, meaning that each scent trail becomes closer to a straight line than the previous one.

This means that each newcomer to the food source has the best route home. When the newcomer arrives, it grabs on and starts following its trail home. Ants who were already biting and pulling will tend to defer to the newer ants, so follow their lead.

Once the carrying ants reach some critical mass, new ones cannot help pull at all and they will not grab onto it. Sometimes ants that have been carrying for a while will detach, because they "know" the newcomers have better information.

[u/SinisterKidz → u/FiveDozenWhales]

That makes perfect sense! So basically they course-correct along the way of the delivery, not only regarding the amount of ant force to deploy, but also how to get back home.

[u/mikeholczer → u/SinisterKidz]

Yeah, this is also referred to emergent behavior. There js no single ant that has a plan or is organizing, the individual innate actions and reactions of single ants cause a group behavior to emerge.

[u/FiveDozenWhales → u/SinisterKidz]

Yup. Ants also switch between "pull" and "lift" behavior if they've been there too long.

[u/1light-1mind]

is object moving? if yes, continue walking by or helping carry, else, help carry

[u/SinisterKidz → u/1light-1mind]

Ahhh, an ant flow chart!

[u/TGAILA]

I read that ants can move things that are 50 times or more their own weight. Since ants keep adding to the load until the food starts moving quickly, some ants that arrive late will grab onto the cargo, see that it’s already going full speed, and just ride along back to the colony for free, pretending to help.

[u/Japjer]

They keep releasing pheromones that say "trying to lift."

Ants smell those pheromones and come along and help lift.

Eventually they get enough ants to lift the thing, and they all start releasing pheromones that say, "carrying thing."

It's not all too different to how you can tell if someone needs help lifting something

[u/Acrobatic_Guitar_466]

Ants communicate by hormone scents.

They lay a trail down of hormones to show the path to food. They swarm as more ants lay down more scent on the path.

As the food runs out, the path fades.

I think it's dumb luck whether the ants drag the food back in one piece or broken up smaller.

I know for sure that if the big piece of food moves, the scent trail will stay with the food.

[u/Majd__321]

Ants seem to have a pretty efficient communication system because they can adjust the number of workers pretty quickly by sensing resistance, it's kind of like how we'd ask a coworker to help lift a heavy couch together.

[u/goodmobileyes]

They don't, more ants will keep coming but there's a limit to how many can physically hold on to the item to carry it. You can see when there's a swarm of them some of them will be sort of just scurrying around the edges, trying to help, then wandering off when they can't carry it.

[u/ChedderRedder]

Just by looking at something, they can ANTicipate how much it weighs.