9 replies to this topic

[maxxkatt]

 

I observed something that I was surprised at that happened yesterday.  I have lots of black ants roaming on my back deck. Usually they are just coming and going in a trail. I observed on the deck rail about 3:00 pm 1 dead ant and two live ants.

 

After a brief rain shower, they were still there seemingly guarding the dead ant. They were touching it with their antennae's (proper term?). When I moved my finger towards the guarding ants they went into action charging my finger. same if I used a piece of pine straw. But was really interesting they stayed there until about 9:00 pm. Later around 11:00 pm I notice the dead ant was gone and the two live ants were gone but a big wood cockroach was at that same spot.

Hmmm, did the roach eat the dead ant?

 

But the real question is do they guard and or mourn their dead? I always thought ants were more just robot like type of insects. Apparently I was wrong to think that.

 

I know nothing about ants, but think they are neat, especially these big black ones. A few get in the house from time to time and I just let them walk on a piece of paper and take them out. We have some very tiny micro black ants that are not even as big as the leg of these big black ants.

 

Thanks for any help on this observation.

 

 

[dspdrew]

This is where it starts. Next you'll have 300 colonies of ants living in test tubes in your kitchen, and blocks of Ytong on your counter.

 

You might not get that, but everybody else here will.

 

I don't really have a good answer to your question. They will be loyal to a queen, but that's not what is going on in this situation. I often see some of my ants spending a long time smelling and sort of tending to a recently deceased fellow worker. I have never really been sure what exactly they are doing. I'm pretty sure that ants do not have any sort of emotions, and like you mentioned, they actually really are a lot like little robots. Whatever it is that you see them doing, is probably just part of their "program".

[Gregory2455]

Nobody knows if they have emotions or not, but like you said, most people think of them as robots. Well, yeah, they are kind of like live robots with a rescue and recover program. They will care for recently deceased workers, as when an ant dies, it releases pheromones that it is dying, and for workers to come help it. That is the smell you get when you crush a Tapinoma sessile for example. I personally would like ants to have emotions, it would be cool, but there is no way to prove it.

[steelchair]

Just watch the movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids.

[Mercutia]

I'm taking a theoretical stab in the dark here from what I observe from my ants.

 

I notice when an ant dies in my colonies the ants actually take a while to remove them from the nesting area not because they are busy doing other things, but they seem to interact with the dead ant body as if it were still alive, touching it with their antennae and then moving on. I assume that there is still sufficiently smell like part of the colony and it takes a while for those pheromones to wear off. So maybe it takes them a while to realize that their nest mate is dead based on this.

 

Other than that, I have no other theory.

 

Our emotions and "feelings", particularly those of empathy are a social evolutionary trait that we as humans have evolved to help us survive. While mourning culture occurs in other animals like dogs and elephants, I don't imagine ants share the same sophisticated levels of "emotion" that we do so I would say no, ants don't have emotion in our sense, they have environmental triggers.

[Gregory2455]

My Acromyrmex versicolor is going on six hours of surely being dead, and her nervous system is still firing reflex impulses to muscles, that are making her move. That may also contribute to it.

[Myrmicinae]

I highly doubt that these ants were "mourning."  However, as to your larger question, it really depends on your definition of emotion.  Ants are certainly able to learn from success/failure and some would say that emotion is a prerequisite for this.

 

I can say from personal experience that they seem to be capable of feeling "pain" and other simple emotional responses, but this is a tricky subject that science has not yet found a way to answer.

Edited by Myrmicinae, October 14 2014 - 9:10 AM.

[Abednego]

There's some recent research on ant colony "personality."  In this case it's not the personality of individual ants, but a "personality profile" of a colony.  The idea is that characteristic behaviors vary systematically so that one colony of a particular species may be more aggreesive or more active than another colony of the same species. 

[drtrmiller]

Wilson and Holldobler were asked a similar question in a Google conference, and both men, having studied ants in the field and lab for a combined century, agreed that there was no evidence that ants express emotion or engage in play of any sort.  

 

You can probably find the video on YouTube somewhere.

 

Further, any discussion of ant/colony "personality" is a misnomer.  Different ant colonies will behave differently, in the same ways as identical twins may have different interests or phobias.  It's a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental influence that affect colony-wide behavior from attributes such as a colonies ability to deal with stress, to how many workers are dispersed to forage.

Edited by drtrmiller, October 16 2014 - 10:39 AM.

[Abednego]

I agree that "personality" is usually used as an individual attribute, but personality in an individual IS considered to be a set of behavioral manifestations of genetic predispositions and environmental influences, and stress tolerance and distribution of resources are part of the concept.  The level of analysis is certainly different here, and I wouldn't underestimate that, as personality in individuals is played out in the context of neural systems and "colony personality" in this context is played out in networks of individuals.  I think there's a lot of potential for confusion between these two, especially if people view "personality" as some kind of mysterious attribute of people, but "personality" as it's understood by psychologists has an awful lot in common with your definition of what is happening in ants here.