Ants are amazing scientific and social beings!
Some time ago, scientists who studied ants thought that ants have some random path finding function in their brains. However, when an ant finds food, they lay a pheromone path to signal other ants to find the same food. At first, this path seems random. However, as more ants use the same path, they optimize it, and it becomes straighter. Overall, the colony makes a distribution network that is very efficient at finding and collecting food wherever it is.
However, it gets weirder. The individual ant is actually smarter than random by a lot. The ant brain remembers stacks of landmarks that they can follow home if they find food. They keep track of general distance and direction from the ant colony. If both of these methods fail to get home. They have a systemic search pattern.
Ants also confound the theory of evolution in a couple of ways. There are supercolonies, including one that spans the Andes Mt. Range, that use tens of thousands of ants. These ants are born in one place, and they travel around to die in a completely other place. They collect food for each other without discrimination. The supercolony may include several different species of ants selflessly working together for the betterment of the group. The supercolony includes queens that are both spread out from each other, and in the same room. The supercolony includes a long network of tunnels connected to each other for miles.
Under normal evolution, each ant should try its hardest to spread its own gene by competing with the other ants. However, they don't seem to do that at all. In evolution, there was another theory where it is logical for an organism to to die in order to save more than 2 of their siblings, because a sibling has half of another siblings genes. However, ants in these supercolonies die to save any queen, regardless or relatedness.
To this day, the ant's altruism remains a puzzle in evolution...
Finally, some ant's farm. Ants don't have the ability to digest the cellulose in leaves. However, some ants cut up leaves, drag them underground, allow a fungus to digest the leaves into a simpler form, then the ants eat the fungus. Apart from farming fungus, some ants also domesticated aphids, and milk the aphids for dew to eat. Of course, the ants feed the aphids in their farms. Besides humans, ants are the only other living creature that domesticated any other living creature.
Information Collected from wikipedia and some random websites. Image Source Pixabay.
https://twitter.com/shamimr17/status/1309881043239858177
https://twitter.com/shamimr17/status/1309881695634518016
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I think it makes sense in a way as the queen lays the eggs and breeds, thus saving the species and spreading its gene. Not only ants but also other eusocial insects seem to demonstrate this behaviour. Nature is fascinating indeed!
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