"Distributed brain" of an ant family. The “distributed brain” of an ant family Why do ants walk on water?

Although they are small, they are very complex creatures. Ants are capable of creating elaborate homes with toilets for themselves, using medications to fight infection, and teaching each other new skills.

Here are 15 very interesting and surprising facts about these insects:

1. Ants are not always hardworking.

Despite their reputation as dedicated workers, not all ants in a family pull more than their own weight.

In one study of an anthill in North America, scientists monitored ants from the genus Temnothorax. They found that almost a quarter of the ants were fairly passive over the entire study period. So far, scientists cannot say why some ants are inactive.

2. Ants enjoy eating fast food.

In 2014, scientists left hot dogs, potato chips and other fast food items on a New York City sidewalk to see how much human food ants wanted to eat.

A day later, they returned to the place and weighed the remaining food to understand how much the ants had eaten. They calculated that ants (and other insects) eat almost 1,000 kg of discarded food per year.

3. Sometimes ants raise butterfly larvae. Blueberry and myrmic.

The Alcon blueberry, a diurnal butterfly from the family Bluebirds, sometimes tricks myrmics - a genus of small earthen ants - into raising their young for them.

Ants sometimes confuse the smell of a caterpillar larva with the smell of their anthill, believing that the larva is part of their family. They take the larva with them to the anthill, supply it with the necessary food and protect it for alien species.

4. Ants make toilets in their anthills.

Ants don't just walk back and forth. Some relieve themselves outside the anthill in a pile called a garbage pit.

Others, as scientists recently discovered, relieve themselves in special places inside their homes.

An example is black garden ants, which, although they leave trash and dead insects outside the anthill, keep their waste in the corners of their homes - a place that looks like a small latrine.

5. Ants take medicine when they are sick.

In a recent study, scientists found that when ants encounter a deadly fungus, they begin to consume food rich in free radicals, which helps fight the infection.

6. Ants can attack prey many times larger and heavier than themselves.

Biting ants of the genus Leptogenys, subfamily Ponerina, primarily feed on centipedes, which are many times the size of the ants themselves. It takes about a dozen of these insects to defeat a centipede, and the attack process itself is quite interesting to watch.

7. Ants can feel insecure.

A 2015 study of black garden ants found that ants can tell when they don't know something.

When scientists put ants in an unpredictable situation, the likelihood that the insects would leave a pheromone trail for their relatives to follow them was significantly reduced.

According to scientists, this means that the insects understand that they are not sure whether they are going in the right direction.

8. Why do ants walk on water?

Have you noticed that ants do not drown when it rains? They are so light that they cannot even break the surface tension of water. Ants just walk on it.

9. Ants have the fastest reflexes in the entire animal kingdom.

Ants of the genus Odontomachus (“fighting with teeth”) are predators and live in South and Central America. They can slam their jaws shut at a speed of 233 km/h.

10. Male ants have no father.

Males emerge from unfertilized eggs and have only one set of chromosomes, which they receive from their mother. Female ants, on the other hand, emerge from fertilized eggs and have two sets of chromosomes: one from the mother and one from the father.

11. Ants count their steps.

In the windy desert expanses, ants go home after searching for food, counting their steps to return back to the anthill.

In 2006, a study was conducted that proved that ants take the same steps, even if their legs are lengthened or shortened.

12. Ants have been to space.

In 2014, a group of ants arrived at the International Space Station to study how insects behave in microgravity. Despite the unusual surroundings, the ants continued to work together, exploring their territory.

13. Ants are the only non-human animals that can teach.

In a 2006 study, scientists discovered that small ants of the species Temnothorax albipennis lead other ants of their species to food, thereby showing them the way so that they remember. According to scientists, this is the first time that one non-human animal trains another.

14. Ants can play the role of pesticides.

Scientists conducted a detailed review of more than 70 studies that analyzed the possibility of using tailor ants to protect farmland. They found that these insects drive pests away from citrus and other fruit crops.

Tailor ants live in nests that they build in trees. The study found that orchards with trees containing tailor ants had less damage, which in turn resulted in bountiful harvests.

15. Ants can clone each other.

Amazon ants reproduce through cloning. There are no males in the ant colony, and scientists never found any, but instead they discovered that the entire colony of these ants was made up of clones of the queen.

The complexity of the life of an ant family surprises even specialists, and for the uninitiated it generally seems like a miracle. It is difficult to believe that the life of the entire ant community and each individual member of it is controlled only by innate instinctive reactions. Scientists are not yet clear how the coordination of collective actions of tens and hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of an anthill occurs, how the ant family receives and analyzes information about the state of the environment necessary to maintain the viability of the anthill. A hypothesis that considers these issues from a point of view external to myrmecology, using ideas from information and control theory, may seem fantastic. However, we believe that it has the right to discussion.

The science of ants - myrmecology - has collected a huge amount of observational material describing the features of the life of an anthill. When studying this material, one notices a clear discrepancy between the high “intellectual level” of the functioning of the anthill as a whole and the microscopic dimensions of the nervous system of an individual ant.

The anthill as a single object is a highly rational and skillful “organism” that very effectively uses the extremely limited means available to it to maintain life. It adapts well not only to cyclical changes in the environment (changes of seasons and time of day), but also to its random disturbances (weather changes, damage due to external influences, etc.).

The ant family has a strict internal structure with clearly established roles for each ant, and these roles can change with its age, or they can remain constant. The organizational structure of the anthill allows you to flexibly respond to any disturbance and carry out all the required work, promptly attracting the necessary labor resources to carry it out.

The activity of the ant family is strikingly focused. Ants, for example, successfully engage in “animal husbandry” by breeding aphids. The secretions of aphids, the so-called honeydew, serve as a source of carbohydrate-rich food for ants. They regularly “milk” aphids, and “forager” ants carry honeydew in their crops to feed the rest of the ants. At the same time, the ants actively take care of the aphids: they protect them from pests and attacks from other insects, move them to the most suitable areas of the plant, build canopies for protection from the sun, and take the female aphids to a warm anthill for the winter. Ants are skilled “animal breeders”, therefore, in the colonies they care for, the rate of development and reproduction of aphids is much higher than in “independent” colonies of aphids of the same species.

In some species of ants, a significant proportion of their food consists of seeds of various herbs. Ants collect them and store them in special dry storage areas in their nests. Before eating, the seeds are peeled and ground into flour. The flour is mixed with the saliva of the feeding insects, and this dough is fed to the larvae. Special measures are taken to ensure the safety of grain during long-term storage. For example, after rains, seeds are taken out of storage to the surface and dried.

Tiny Amazon ants can build traps for insects much larger than themselves. The size ratios are such that they vividly resemble the hunting of mammoths by primitive people. By cutting off the thin hair-fibers of the herbaceous plant in which the insects live, the ants weave a cocoon from them. They make many small holes in the walls of the cocoon. The cocoon is placed at the exit from the cavity inside the house plant, and hundreds of worker ants hide in it. They stick their heads into holes in the walls of the cocoon, acting as small living traps, and wait for the victim. When an insect lands on a cocoon camouflaged in the cavity of a plant, the ants grab it by the legs, mandibles and antennae and hold it until reinforcements arrive. The newly arrived ants begin to sting the prey and do this until it is completely paralyzed. The insect is then dismembered and carried piece by piece to the nest. It is very interesting that when constructing a trap, ants use “composite” materials. To increase the strength of the cocoon, they spread a special mold over its surface. Individual hair fibers are glued together with this “glue”, the walls of the cocoon become rigid, and their strength increases significantly.

Even more surprising is what another Amazonian ant does. In the Amazon forests there are areas of forest in which only one species of trees grows. In the Amazon jungle, where plants of tens and even hundreds of different species grow on every piece of land, such areas are not only amazing, but also frightening in their unusualness. It’s not for nothing that local Indian tribes call such places “the devil’s gardens” and believe that an evil forest spirit lives there. Biologists who studied this phenomenon recently found out that the culprits behind the appearance of “gardens” are ants of a certain species living in tree trunks. Long-term observations have shown that ants simply kill the sprouts of other plants by injecting formic acid into their leaves. To test this assumption, test plantings of other plants were carried out in the area of ​​one of the “devil’s gardens”: all the seedlings died within 24 hours. Plants planted for control outside such “gardens” developed normally and took root well. This seemingly strange activity of ants has a simple explanation: the ants are expanding their “living space.” They remove competing plants, allowing the trees in which they live to grow freely. According to researchers, one of the largest “devil’s gardens” has existed for more than eight centuries.

Some species of ants set up mushroom plantations in their anthills to supply them with high-calorie protein food. Thus, leaf-cutter ants, which build huge underground nests, feed almost exclusively on mushrooms, and therefore a mushroom plantation is necessarily created in each nest. These mushrooms grow only on special soil - worker ants make it from crushed green leaves and their own excrement. To maintain “soil fertility,” ants constantly renew the soil in the mycelium. When creating a new anthill, the queen ant in her mouth transfers the fungal culture from the old anthill and thus lays the foundation for the food supply of the family.

Ants carefully monitor the condition of their home. A medium-sized anthill consists of 4-6 million needles and twigs. Every day, hundreds of ants carry them from above to the depths of the anthill, and from the lower floors to the top. This ensures a stable humidity regime for the nest, and therefore the dome of the anthill remains dry after rain and does not rot or mold.

Ants solve the problem of warming up an anthill after winter in an original way. The thermal conductivity of the walls of an anthill is very small, and natural warming up in the spring would take a very long time. To speed up this process, the ants bring heat inside the anthill on themselves. When the sun begins to warm up and the snow melts off the anthill, its inhabitants crawl to the surface and begin to “sunbathe.” Very quickly, the ant’s body temperature rises by 10-15 degrees, and it returns back to the cold anthill, warming it with its warmth. Thousands of ants “taking” such “baths” quickly raise the temperature inside the anthill.

The variety of ants is endless. In the tropics there are so-called wandering ants, which roam in large numbers. On their way they destroy all living things, and it is impossible to stop them. Therefore, these ants terrify the inhabitants of tropical America. When a column of stray ants approaches, residents and their pets flee the village. After the column passes through the village, there is nothing living left in it: no rats, no mice, no insects. Moving in a column, stray ants maintain strict order. The edges of the column are guarded by soldier ants with huge jaws; in the center there are females and workers. Workers carry larvae and pupae. The movement continues throughout the daylight hours. At night the column stops and the ants huddle together. To reproduce, ants temporarily switch to a sedentary life, but they do not build an anthill, but a nest from their own bodies in the shape of a ball, hollow inside, with several channels for entry and exit. At this time, the queen begins to lay eggs. Worker ants take care of them and hatch larvae from them. Squads of forager ants leave the nest from time to time to gather food for the family. Sedentary life continues until the larvae grow up. Then the ant family sets off again.

A lot more can be said about the wonders of the ant family, but each individual inhabitant of the anthill is, surprisingly, just a small, fussy insect, in whose actions it is often difficult to find any logic and purpose.

The ant moves along unexpected trajectories, drags alone or in a group some loads (a piece of grass, an ant egg, a lump of earth, etc.), but it is usually difficult to follow its work from start to result. His, so to speak, “labor macro-operations” look more meaningful: the ant dexterously picks up a blade of grass or a piece of pine needles, joins the “group” carry, skillfully and desperately fights in ant battles.

What is striking is not that out of this chaos and seemingly aimless bustle the multifaceted and measured life of the anthill takes shape. If you look at any human construction from a height of hundreds of meters, the picture will be very similar: there, too, hundreds of workers perform dozens of seemingly unrelated operations, and as a result, a skyscraper, blast furnace or dam appears.

Another thing is surprising: in the ant family there is no “brain center” that would manage the common efforts to achieve the desired result, be it repairing the anthill, obtaining food or protecting from enemies. Moreover, the anatomy of an individual ant - scout, worker or queen ant - does not allow placing this “brain center” in an individual ant. The physical dimensions of its nervous system are too small, and the volume of programs and data accumulated over generations necessary to control the life activity of the anthill is too large.

It can be assumed that an individual ant is capable of autonomously performing a small set of “labor macro-operations” on an instinctive level. These can be labor and combat operations, from which, like elementary bricks, the working and combat life of an anthill is formed. But this is not enough for life in an ant family.

To exist in its habitat, an ant family must be able to assess both its own state and the state of the environment, be able to translate these assessments into specific tasks of maintaining homeostasis, set priorities for these tasks, monitor their implementation and, in real time, rearrange work in response to external and internal disturbances.

How do ants do this? If we accept the assumption of instinctive reactions, then a fairly plausible algorithm of behavior may look like this. In the memory of a living being, in one form or another, there should be something similar to the table “situation - instinctive response to the situation.” In any life situation, information coming from the senses is processed by the nervous system and the “image of the situation” created by it is compared with “tabular situations.” If the “image of the situation” coincides with any “tabular situation”, the corresponding “response to the situation” is executed. If there is no match, the behavior is not corrected or some “standard” response is performed. Situations and answers in such a “table” can be generalized, but even then its information volume will be very large even for performing relatively simple management functions.

The “table” that controls the life of an anthill and which lists the variants of work situations and contacts with the environment with the participation of tens of thousands of ants, becomes simply immense, and its storage would require colossal volumes of “storage devices” of the nervous system. In addition, the time to obtain an “answer” when searching in such a “table” will also be very long, since it must be selected from an immensely large set of similar situations. But in real life, these answers need to be received fairly quickly. Naturally, the path of complicating instinctive behavior soon leads to a dead end, especially in cases where instinctive skills of collective behavior are required.

To assess the complexity of the “table of instinctive behavior,” let’s at least look at what basic operations “animal breeder” ants have to perform when caring for aphids. Obviously, ants must be able to find “rich pastures” on leaves and distinguish them from “poor” ones in order to move aphids around the plant in a timely and correct manner. They must be able to recognize insects that are dangerous to aphids and know how to combat them. At the same time, it is quite possible that the methods of fighting different enemies differ from each other, and this, naturally, increases the required amount of knowledge. It is also important to be able to identify female aphids so that at a certain moment (at the beginning of winter) you can transfer them to the anthill, place them in special places and maintain them throughout the winter. In the spring, it is necessary to determine the places of their re-settlement and organize the life of the new colony.

There is probably no need to continue - the operations already listed give an idea of ​​the amount of knowledge and skills needed by the ant. It should be taken into account that all such operations are collective and in different situations can be performed by different numbers of ants. Therefore, it is impossible to carry out this work according to a rigid template and one must be able to adapt to the changing conditions of collective work. For example, an ant “animal breeder” must know not only how to care for aphids, but also how to participate in the collective life of the anthill, when and where to work and rest, what time to start and end the working day, etc. To coordinate the actions of tens and hundreds of thousands of ants in the vast ocean of options for collective labor activity, a level of control is required that is orders of magnitude higher than that which is possible with instinctive behavior.

Elementary intellectual capabilities appeared among representatives of the animal world of the Earth precisely as a way to circumvent this fundamental limitation. Instead of a rigid choice from a “table,” the method of constructing a “response” to an emerging situation from a relatively small set of elementary reactions began to be used. The algorithm for such construction is stored in “memory”, and special blocks of the nervous system build the necessary “response” in accordance with it. Naturally, that part of the structure of the nervous system that is responsible for reactions to external disturbances becomes significantly more complicated. But this complication pays off in that it allows, without requiring unrealistically large volumes of the nervous system, to diversify the behavior of an individual and a community almost unlimitedly. Mastering a new type of behavior from this point of view only requires adding to the “memory” a new algorithm for generating an “answer” and a minimum amount of new data. With instinctive behavior, the capabilities of the nervous system quickly put a limit to such development.

It is obvious that the above functions of managing an ant colony, necessary to maintain balance with the environment and survive, cannot be performed at an instinctive level. They are close to what we are used to calling thinking.

But is thinking accessible to an ant? According to some reports, its nervous system contains only about 500 thousand neurons. For comparison: there are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain. So why can an anthill do what it does and live the way it does? Where is the “thinking center” of an ant family located if it cannot be located in the ant’s nervous system? I will say right away that the mysterious “psychofields” and “intellectual aura” as the container of this “center” will not be considered here. We will look for real-life locations for the possible location of such a “center” and ways of its functioning.

Let's imagine that the programs and data of a hypothetical brain of sufficient power are divided into a large number of small segments, each of which is located in the nervous system of one ant. In order for these segments to work as a single brain, it is necessary to connect them with communication lines and include a “supervisor” program in the set of brain programs that would monitor the transfer of data between segments and ensure the required sequence of their work. In addition, when “building” such a brain, one must take into account the fact that some ants - carriers of program segments - may die of old age or die in a difficult struggle for survival, and with them the brain segments located in them will die. In order for the brain to be resistant to such losses, it is necessary to have backup copies of segments.

Self-healing programs and an optimal redundancy strategy make it possible, generally speaking, to create a brain of very high reliability that can work for a long time, despite military and domestic losses and changes in generations of ants. We will call such a “brain” distributed among tens and hundreds of thousands of ants the distributed brain of an anthill, the central brain, or the superbrain. It must be said that in modern technology systems similar in structure to a superbrain are not new. Thus, American universities already use thousands of computers connected to the Internet to solve pressing scientific problems that require large computing resources.

In addition to the segments of the distributed brain, the nervous system of each ant must also contain programs of “labor macro-operations” performed according to the commands of this brain. The composition of the program of “labor macrooperations” determines the role of the ant in the hierarchy of the anthill, and the segments of the distributed brain work as a single system, as if outside the consciousness of the ant (if it had one).

So, suppose that a community of collective insects is controlled by a distributed brain, and each member of the community is the carrier of a particle of this brain. In other words, in each ant's nervous system there is a small segment of the central brain, which is the collective property of the community and ensures the existence of that community as a whole. In addition, it contains programs of autonomous behavior (“labor macro-operations”), which are, as it were, a description of his “personality” and which it is logical to call his own segment. Since the volume of the nervous system of each ant is small, the volume of the individual program of “labor macro-operations” is also small. Therefore, such programs can ensure independent behavior of an insect only when performing an elementary action and require a mandatory control signal after its completion.

Speaking about the superbrain, we cannot ignore the problem of communication between its segments located in the nervous system of individual ants. If we accept the distributed brain hypothesis, we must take into account that in order to control the anthill system, large amounts of information must be quickly transferred between brain segments and individual ants must frequently receive control and corrective commands. However, long-term studies of ants (and other collective insects) have not discovered any powerful information transmission systems: the “communication lines” found provide a transmission speed of the order of a few bits per minute and can only be auxiliary.

Today we know of only one channel that could satisfy the requirements of a distributed brain: electromagnetic oscillations in a wide range of frequencies. Although to date such canals have not been found in ants, termites, or bees, it does not follow that they are absent. It would be more correct to say that the research methods and equipment used did not allow us to detect these communication channels.

Modern technology, for example, provides examples of completely unexpected communication channels in seemingly well-studied areas that can only be detected by specially developed methods. A good example would be picking up faint sound vibrations, or, simply put, eavesdropping. A solution to this problem was sought and found both in the architecture of ancient Egyptian temples and in modern directional microphones, but with the advent of the laser it suddenly became clear that there is another reliable and high-quality channel for receiving very weak acoustic vibrations. Moreover, the capabilities of this channel far exceed everything that was considered possible in principle and seem fabulous. It turned out that you can clearly hear, without any microphones or radio transmitters, everything that is said in a low voice in a closed room, and do this from a distance of 50-100 meters. To do this, it is enough that the room has a glazed window. The fact is that sound waves arising during a conversation cause vibrations of window glass with an amplitude of microns and fractions of a micron. The laser beam, reflected from the oscillating glass, makes it possible to record these vibrations on the receiving device and, after appropriate mathematical processing, turn them into sound. This new, previously unknown method of recording vibrations made it possible to capture imperceptibly weak sounds in conditions where their detection seemed fundamentally impossible. Obviously, an experiment relying on traditional methods of searching for electromagnetic signals would not be able to detect this channel.

Why can’t we assume that the distributed brain uses some unknown method of transmitting information via a channel of electromagnetic oscillations? On the other hand, in everyday life one can find examples of the transmission of information through channels, the physical basis of which is unknown. I don’t mean fulfilling premonitions, emotional connections between loved ones and other similar cases. Around these phenomena, despite their unconditional existence, so many mystical and semi-mystical fantasies, exaggerations, and sometimes simply deception have accumulated that I do not dare to refer to them. But we know, for example, such a common phenomenon as the sensation of being looked at. Almost every one of us can remember times when he turned around, feeling someone's gaze. There is no doubt about the existence of an information channel that is responsible for transmitting the sensation of looking, but there is also no explanation of how some features of the state of the beholder’s psyche are transmitted to the person he is looking at. The electromagnetic field of the brain, which could be responsible for this information exchange, is practically imperceptible when removed at a distance of tens of centimeters, and the sensation of gaze is transmitted over tens of meters.

The same can be said about such a well-known phenomenon as hypnosis. It's not just humans who have hypnotic abilities: some snakes are known to use hypnosis when hunting. During hypnosis, information is also transferred from the hypnotist to the hypnotized person through a channel, which, although it certainly exists, the nature of which is unknown. Moreover, if a human hypnotist sometimes uses vocal orders, then snakes do not use a sound signal, but their hypnotic suggestion does not lose power because of this. And no one doubts that you can feel someone else’s gaze, and no one denies the reality of hypnosis due to the fact that in these phenomena the channels of information transmission are unknown.

All of the above can be considered as confirmation of the admissibility of the assumption of the existence of an information transmission channel between segments of a distributed brain, the physical basis of which is still unknown to us. Since science, technology and the practice of everyday life give us unexpected and unsolved examples of various information channels, there is apparently nothing unusual in the assumption of the presence of another channel of an unknown nature.

To explain why communication lines in collective insects have not yet been discovered, many different reasons can be given - from very real (insufficient sensitivity of research equipment) to fantastic ones. It is easier, however, to assume that these lines of communication exist and see what consequences follow from this.

Direct observations of ants support the hypothesis of external commands controlling the behavior of an individual insect. Typical of an ant is an unexpected and sudden change in direction of movement, which cannot be explained by any visible external reasons. You can often observe how an ant stops for a moment and suddenly turns, continuing to move at an angle to the previous direction, and sometimes in the opposite direction. The observed pattern can plausibly be interpreted as “stopping to receive a control signal” and “continuing to move after receiving an order for a new direction.” When performing any labor operation, an ant can (although this happens much less frequently) interrupt it and either move on to another operation or move away from the place of work. This behavior also resembles a reaction to an external signal.

How to study the life of ants

Yu. Frolov

First of all, simply by observation, and since time immemorial.

Even in the Bible (Proverbs of King Solomon), lazy people are advised to learn hard work from the ant and the decentralized organization of the actions of these social insects is noted: “Go to the ant, slothful person, look at his actions and be wise. He has neither a chief, nor a steward, nor a ruler, but he prepares his grain in the summer, and gathers his food during the harvest.”

Aristotle, Plutarch, and Pliny followed the ants with enthusiasm, making many subtle and correct observations, but also several mistakes. Thus, Aristotle took winged ants as a separate species and wrote that ants reproduce by white worms, first round and then elongating. Of course, he meant the eggs from which the larvae emerge.

Naturalists of the past dug up anthills to find out their structure, the distribution of chambers for different purposes, and to understand the caste organization of ant society.

Closer to the present day, it has become possible, without such extreme measures as digging up their home, to observe not only the activities of ants outside the anthill, but also their life at home. They insert glass into the wall of the ant heap or simply settle a colony of ants in a laboratory glass anthill. It is one-dimensional: two large glasses are glued together, leaving a gap of several millimeters between them, building materials are poured there and ants are released.

Since ants do not like daylight in their home, it is often more convenient to monitor them using infrared light. Sometimes a flexible fiber endoscope with a light bulb at the end is inserted into the anthill, allowing photographs to be taken.

To monitor the life and movements of individual individuals, they are marked with a drop of paint, sometimes luminous, so that they can be observed in the dark. True, this method is only suitable for relatively large species.

An even more sophisticated method is labeling with weakly radioactive isotopes, which made it possible to study trophallaxis—the exchange of food between ants. They are either given sugar syrup with a carbon isotope, or given a victim - a caterpillar raised on a diet supplemented with radioactive phosphorus. The Geiger counter then shows how, through the exchange of regurgitated droplets of food, one fed ant spreads radioactivity throughout the anthill.

The structure of underground ant nests is studied either by excavating them, or by making casts of complex passages and chambers of the nest, pouring liquid gypsum, quickly hardening polymers or fusible metal into its entrance.

From the point of view of the superbrain hypothesis, the phenomenon of so-called lazy ants is very interesting. Observations show that not all ants in a family are models of hard work. It turns out that approximately 20% of the ant family practically does not participate in labor activities. Research has shown that “lazy” ants are not ants on vacation, who return to work after regaining their strength. It turned out that if you remove a noticeable part of the working ants from the family, the pace of work of the remaining “workers” increases accordingly, and the “lazy” ants are not included in the work. Therefore, they cannot be considered either a “labor reserve” or “vacationers”.

Today, two explanations for the existence of “lazy” ants have been proposed. In the first case, it is assumed that “lazy” ants are a kind of “pensioners” of the anthill, aged ants, incapable of active work. The second explanation is even simpler: these are ants that for some reason do not want to work. Since there are no other, more convincing explanations, I think I have the right to make one more assumption.

For any distributed information processing system - and a superbrain is a type of such a system - one of the main problems is ensuring reliability. For a superbrain, this task is vital. The basis of the information processing system is software in which the methods of data analysis and decision-making adopted in the system are encoded, which is also true for the superbrain. Surely his programs are very different from programs written for modern computing systems. But in one form or another they must exist, and it is they who are responsible for the results of the work of the superbrain, i.e. ultimately for the survival of the population.

But, as mentioned above, programs and the data they process are not stored in one place, but are divided into many segments located in individual ants. And even with very high reliability of the operation of each element of the superbrain, the resulting reliability of the system is low. So, for example, let the reliability of each element (segment) be 0.9999, i.e. a malfunction occurs on average once every 10 thousand calls. But if we calculate the total reliability of a system consisting of, say, 60 thousand such segments, then it turns out to be less than 0.0025, i.e. decreases by approximately 400 times compared to the reliability of a single element!

Various methods have been developed and used in modern technology to increase the reliability of large systems. For example, duplicating elements dramatically increases reliability. So, if, with the same reliability of an element as in the above example, it is duplicated, then the total number of elements will double, but the total reliability of the system will increase and become almost equal to the reliability of an individual element.

If we return to the ant family, we must say that the reliability of the functioning of each segment of the superbrain is significantly lower than the given values, if only because of the short lifespan and the high probability of death of the carriers of these segments - individual ants. Therefore, multiple duplication of superbrain segments is a prerequisite for its normal functioning. But besides duplication, there are other ways to increase the overall reliability of the system.

The fact is that the system as a whole does not react equally to failures in its different elements. There are failures that fatally affect the operation of the system: for example, when a program that ensures the required order of information processing does not work correctly, or when unique data is lost due to a failure. But if a failure occurs in a segment whose results can be corrected in some way, then this problem only leads to some delay in obtaining the result. By the way, in real conditions, most of the results obtained by the superbrain belong precisely to this group, and only in rare cases do failures lead to serious consequences. Therefore, the reliability of the system can also be increased by increasing, so to speak, the “physical reliability” of the segments in which particularly important and unrecoverable programs and data are located.

Based on the above, it can be assumed that it is “lazy” ants that are carriers of specialized, especially important segments of the distributed brain. These segments can have various purposes, for example, perform the functions of maintaining the integrity of the brain when individual ants die, collect and process information from lower-level segments, ensure the correct sequence of tasks of the superbrain, etc. Relief from work provides “lazy” ants with increased safety and security. reliability of existence.

This assumption about the role of “lazy” ants is confirmed by an experiment conducted in the Stanford laboratory of the famous physicist, Nobel Prize winner I. Prigogine, who studied the problems of self-organization and collective activity. In this experiment, an ant family was divided into two parts: one included only “lazy” ants, and the other included “workers”. After some time, it became clear that the “labor profile” of each new family repeats the “labor profile” of the original family. It turned out that in the family of “lazy” ants, only every fifth one remained “lazy”, while the rest were actively involved in work. In the family of “workers”, the same fifth part became “lazy”, and the rest remained “workers”.

The results of this elegant experiment are easy to explain in terms of the distributed brain hypothesis. Apparently, in each family, part of its members is delegated to store particularly important segments of the distributed brain. Probably, in terms of the structure and structure of the nervous system, “lazy” ants are no different from “workers” - it’s just that at some point the necessary segments are loaded into them. This is exactly what happened to the new colonies in the experiment described above: the central brain performed something similar to downloading new software, and this completed the design of the ant colonies.

Already today it is possible to build fairly plausible hypotheses about the structure of the distributed brain, the topology of the network connecting its segments, and the basic principles of redundancy within it. But that's not the main point. The main thing is that the concept of a distributed brain allows us to consistently explain the main mystery of the anthill: where and how the control information that determines the highly complex life of an ant family is stored and used.

“Science and Life” about ants:
Ant close-up. - 1972, No. 9.
Kovalev V. Ant communications. - 1974, No. 5.
Khalifman I. Operation “Ant”. - 1974, No. 5.
Marikovsky P. Ant resuscitation service. - 1976, No. 4.
Vasilyeva E., Khalifman I. Giant at the anthill. - 1980, No. 3.
Konstantinov I. City of Ants. - 1982, No. 1.
Vasilyeva E., Khalifman I. Nomadic ants. - 1986, No. 1.
Ants also have individuality. - 1998, No. 12.
Aleksandrovsky G. The evolution of ants lasts 100 million years. - 2000, No. 10.
Starikova O., Furman M. Ants in the city. - 2001, No. 1.
Uspensky K. Sand ant. - 2003, No. 8.
Metal anthill. - 2004, No. 11.
Ants choose their home. - 2006, No. 7.

A bit is a unit of information that allows one to make one binary choice: “yes-no”, “left-right”, etc.

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Ants are one of the most highly organized insects on the planet. Their abilities for cooperation and self-sacrifice for the good of the colony, high adaptability, and activity that resembles intelligence in complexity - all this has long attracted the attention of scientists. And today science knows numerous interesting facts about ants, some of which are known only to a narrow circle of specialists, and some of which refute established myths. For example…

Ants are the most numerous insects on Earth

According to estimates by one of the world's most respected myrmecologists, Edward Wilson, there are between 1 and 10 quadrillion individual ants living on Earth today - that is, from 10 to the 15th power to 10 to the 16th power of individual ants.

Incredible, but true - for every living person there are about a million of these creatures, and their total mass is approximately equal to the total mass of all people.

On a note

Myrmecology is the science of ants. Accordingly, a myrmecologist is a scientist primarily engaged in the study of this group of insects. It was thanks to the works of such scientists that very interesting facts about ants became known, expanding the understanding of science about these insects.

On the Pacific island of Christmas there are about 2,200 ants and 10 nest entrances per square meter of soil surface. And, for example, in the savannas of West Africa, for every square kilometer of area there are 2 billion ants and 740,000 nests!

No other group of insects reaches such a population size and density.

Among the ants are the most dangerous insects in the world

Perhaps the inhabitants of equatorial Africa are not as afraid of poisonous snakes, large predators, or spiders as they are - a column of several million insects, whose soldiers are armed with powerful jaws, destroys almost all life in its path. Such trips are the key to the survival of the anthill.

More interesting facts: stray ants are one of the most common. The soldier can reach a length of 3 cm, the queen - 5 cm.

When the inhabitants of a village learn that such a colony is about to pass through their settlement, they leave their homes, taking all their domestic animals with them. If you forget a goat in a stall, the ants will bite it to death. But they destroy all cockroaches, rats and mice in the villages.

But the bullet ant is considered the most dangerous ant in the world: 30 of its bites per 1 kg of the victim’s body weight are fatal. The pain from their bite exceeds that from the bites of any wasps, and is felt throughout the day.

Among the Indian tribes of South America, to initiate a boy into a man, a sleeve with live ants placed in it is put on the initiate's arm. After being bitten, the boy's hands become paralyzed and swollen for several days, sometimes shock occurs and the fingers turn black.

Ant eggs are not really eggs

What are commonly called ant eggs are actually developing ant larvae. The ant eggs themselves are very small and are of no practical interest to humans.

But larvae are readily eaten in Africa and Asia - such a dish is rich in protein and fat. In addition, ant larvae are ideal food for the chicks of various ornamental birds.

Ants are a famous delicacy

The most famous ant dish is wood ant sauce, which is used as a condiment in Southeast Asia.

Honey ants are very interesting in this regard. In each anthill there are from several tens to several hundred ants, which are used by the remaining members of the colony as food reservoirs. They are specially fed during the rainy season; their abdomen is filled with a mixture of water and sugars and swells to such a size that the insect cannot move.

During the dry season, other individuals from the anthill lick the secretion constantly secreted by these living barrels and can do without external food sources. Such ants are actively collected where they live - in Mexico and the southern United States - and eaten. They taste like honey.

Another interesting gastronomic fact: in Thailand and Myanmar, ant larvae are consumed as a delicacy and sold by weight in markets. And in Mexico, the larvae of large ants are eaten in the same way as fish eggs in Russia.

Ants and termites are completely different insects

Indeed, ants belong to the order Hymenoptera, and their closest relatives are wasps, bees, sawflies and ichneumon wasps.

Termites are a rather isolated group of insects close to cockroaches. Some scientists even include them in the cockroach order.

This is interesting

The complex social structure of a termite mound, reminiscent of that of an anthill, is just one example of convergence in the animal kingdom, the development of similar traits in members of different groups facing similar conditions.

It is noteworthy that in equatorial Africa there lives a mammal - the naked mole rat - whose colonies also resemble colonies of ants: in mole rats, only one female reproduces, and the rest of the individuals serve her, feed her and expand their burrows.

The vast majority of ants are females

All worker ants and soldier ants in each anthill are females and are not capable of reproducing. They develop from fertilized eggs, while unfertilized eggs develop into males.

An interesting fact about ants: whether a worker ant or a future queen grows from an egg depends on how the larva feeds. Worker ants can decide for themselves how to feed the brood and how many future queens to feed.

Some do not have a uterus as such, but all working females can reproduce. There are also species in whose nests several queens live. A classic example of this is the nests of house ants (pharaoh ants).

Queen ants can live up to 20 years

The usual lifespan of a queen that has managed to establish a colony is 5-6 years, but some live up to 12 or even 20 years! In the world of insects, this is a record: most single insects, even larger ones, live for several months at most. Only in some cicadas and beetles, the full life expectancy, including the larval stage, can reach 6-7 years.

This interesting fact does not mean at all that all queens have such a life expectancy: most fertilized females die after the summer, and a significant part of the established colonies also die out for various reasons in the first year of their existence.

There are slave ants

The connections of different ants with each other are so diverse that even people can sometimes envy them.

For example, in a whole genus of Amazon ants, worker ants do not know how to feed and care for the nest on their own. But they know how to attack the nests of other, smaller species of ants and steal larvae from them. The ants developing from these larvae will subsequently care for other than their queen and soldiers.

In other species, this behavior has gone so far that the queen simply enters someone else’s anthill, kills the queen living there, and the worker ants recognize her as their own and care for her and her offspring. After this, the anthill itself is doomed: from the eggs of such a female, only females capable of capturing the anthill of another species will develop, and with the death of all the working ants, the colony will be empty.

There are also benign cases of slavery. For example, the queen steals several pupae to found a colony, and the ants developing from them help her at the very initial stage of colony development. Further, the colony develops with the help of the descendants of the queen herself.

Ants can learn

Interesting facts about ants related to the phenomenon of learning attract the close attention of many scientists.

For example, in some species of ants, those individuals that managed to find food teach others to find a place with food. Moreover, if, for example, in bees this information is transmitted during a special dance, then the ant specifically teaches another to follow a specific route.

Video: ants build a living bridge with their bodies

Experiments have also verified that during training, the teacher ant reaches the desired point four times slower than it would reach it on its own.

Ants know how to farm

This interesting feature of ants has been known for a long time - South American ants use the most complex food chain in the animal world:

• some members of the colony bite off a large piece of a tree leaf and bring it to the anthill

• smaller individuals that never leave the colony chew the leaves, mix them with excrement and parts of a special mycelium
• the resulting mass is stored in special areas of the anthill - real beds - where mushrooms develop on it, providing the ants with protein food.

The interesting thing about ants is that they do not eat the fruiting bodies themselves - they feed on special growths of the mycelium. Some members of the colony constantly bite off the emerging fruiting bodies, preventing the mycelium from wasting nutrients on useless stems and caps.

This is interesting

When a fertilized young female leaves the nest, she carries away a tiny piece of mycelium in a special pocket on her head. It is precisely this reserve that is the basis for the well-being of the future colony.

Besides ants, only humans and termites have learned to cultivate other living organisms for their own benefit.

Relationship between ants and aphids

The herding tendencies of ants are known to many: some anthills are so dependent on swarms of aphids that when the latter die out, they also die. Scientists believe that the release of secretion at one time was a protective reaction of aphids from attack by enemies, only the secretion itself was sharp-smelling and toxic.

But one day, natural selection suggested to pests that ants could not be scared away, but rather lured and forced to protect themselves. This is how a unique example of symbiosis of two completely different groups of insects arose: aphids share sweet, healthy and satisfying secretions with ants, and the ants protect them.

The secretions of aphids that attract ants are called honeydew. In addition to aphids, scale insects, scale insects and some cicadas share it with ants.

Interestingly, many insects have learned to secrete a secret that is attractive to ants in order to penetrate their nests. Some beetles, caterpillars and butterflies feed on the reserves of the ants themselves in the anthill, while the ants do not touch them precisely because of their ability to share honeydew. Some such guests in anthills simply devour ant larvae, and the ants themselves are ready to forgive their treachery for a drop of sweet secretion.

The above are just some interesting facts about ants. In the biology of each species of these insects you can find something unique and original.

It is thanks to this uniqueness and abundance of specific adaptive features that they managed to become one of the most numerous and advanced groups of arthropods in general.

Interesting video: a battle between two ant colonies