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Ant species cultivates coffee for accommodation
- Karlozkiller 10y agoAnt intelligence is often attributed to simple rule following behaviour and the ability to make the next ant adapt to what you have already done, for example they optimize the path to some food-source by leaving scent trails that will fade if no ants travel the road. They've also been known to measure the size of enclosed areas by simply following the outer boundary until they find the initial starting point/entrance again and somehow using the time or effort it took, to be a measure of the size of the place. It seems to be different species of ants having different behaviours, so maybe they're just stupid rule followers as one might first think. Now if we could make one species of ants learn from and adapt behaviour from another species, then there's no doubt they possess intelligence. And if they're not intelligent, should we attribute the ingeniousness these tiny buggers display to evolution instead?
- vinchuco 10y agoSome species appear to also count steps. A researcher glued stilts to ants legs after leaving the anthill and they would go past it in their return and get lost (or so I remember reading in "the math book").
- nitrogen 10y agoCould it also be possible that the stilt-wearing ant was too far off the ground to smell its colony, or maybe it deemed itself defective and quarantined itself?
- nickff 10y agoIt also seems possible that the stilts would frustrate effort measurement.
- Someone 10y agoThey also shortened legs, with the reverse effect. Desert ants cannot use scent because scents evaporate too fast in deserts (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/06/060629-ants-stilts_2.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/06/060629-ants-..., http://inspiringscience.net/2012/11/09/do-ants-really-count-their-steps/ http://inspiringscience.net/2012/11/09/do-ants-really-count-...)
- vinchuco 10y agoPossibly. I didn't read the linked paper, just the little article about it in this pop-sci book. Regardless, the point is that humans are not the only beings who measure quantitatively. Reminds me of a silly story: http://jokes.cc.com/funny-doctor/fj9nmq/the-scientist-and-the-frog http://jokes.cc.com/funny-doctor/fj9nmq/the-scientist-and-th...
- amasad 10y agoYou can test this by rearing a generation of ants with no contact with the previous generation and see if they exhibit the same behavior. My bet would be on that it's all innate. I haven't seen examples of intergenerational knowledge transmission in anything other than primates. (Maybe because primate offspring spend much a long time growing up to be adults which gives them time to learn)
- arghnoname 10y agoCockatoos have been seen to learn tool use from another cockatoo, though I think you could probably attempt to argue otherwise. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28990335 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28990335
- louhike 10y agoAs someone who have seen a lot of wildlife documentaries, I have to disagree. I've seen of lot of cases of parents showing how to find food, how to hunt or find shelter, etc. Most animals are able to learn at least in their youth.
- Quarrelsome 10y agoyes but ants are insects, not mammals. Insects have crazy amounts of children and their birthing patterns don't probably don't translate well to learning by example as the parent doesn't have time to teach all the children. I think the innateness is a more likely cause.
- louhike 10y agoI said this because in the parent comment, he said "anything other than primates". I agree it is different for insects and as far as we know they do not seem to learn from others.
- ryan_j_naughton 10y agoActually the founder of the field sociobiology (or at least the main popularizer) is EO Wilson. He studies ants, and since he effectively founded the field, many scientists who study mammals actually studied under him since there wasn't an established place for sociobiology then. Of course intelligence and sociology/social behavior are different; however, they virtually always have overlaps if any complex intelligence is to occur. It's because you need intergenerational culture to exist in order to build up such knowledge. EO Wilson and others have proven such intergenerational knowledge transfer exists in ants. Intelligence doesn't need to occur at an individual level. The hive can be intelligent through emergent properties and can also maintain state that acts like memory for learned experiences. http://discovermagazine.com/2008/nov/12-wilson-says-ants-live-in-humanlike-civilizations/ http://discovermagazine.com/2008/nov/12-wilson-says-ants-liv... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson http://www.pbs.org/program/eo-wilson/ http://www.pbs.org/program/eo-wilson/
- d1ffuz0r 10y agoIt would be interesting to see what will happen if we send these ants to the space, for how long they can survive. They could be first creatures from the Earth to live on Mars and other planets
- guardian5x 10y agoAnd let them mutate, become super intelligent killer giant ants and declare war on earth? No thanks! But seriously, they would probably just die..
- amenghra 10y agoEmpire of the ants is a fun piece of fiction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Ants_(novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Ants_(novel)
- JackFr 10y ago"Leiningen Versus the Ants" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiningen_Versus_the_Ants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiningen_Versus_the_Ants) is a great short story - also inspiration for the name of the Clojure build tool.
- zeristor 10y agoPhase IV is quite good too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV
- clayrichardson 10y agoNon mobile linque: http://www.dw.com/en/ant-species-cultivates-coffee-for-accommodation/a-36477533 http://www.dw.com/en/ant-species-cultivates-coffee-for-accom...
- sctb 10y agoThanks, we've updated the link.
- DeepYogurt 10y agoThere are ants that harvest leafs in order to cultivate fungus as well as well as ants that cultivate aphids, so cultivating something else is really not that surprising. That said, ants are cool and coffee is cool and I'm glad I've now read about their intersection.
- MyNameIsFred 10y agoThe striking difference here, at least to me, is the a matter of scale and delay. Aphids and fungus are smaller than the ants, and have shorter lifecycles than the ants themselves. Planting and cultivation of a coffee plant suggests understanding of much larger scale (both literally and conceptually).
- rubberstamp 10y agoI have always wondered how they transfer such knowledge down the generations and more importantly how they gathered such knowledge in the first place. There is striking similarity between humans and ants in group work and working towards common goals necessary for survival. There are brown and green aphids and ants breeds them keeping a particular ratio - one aphid type makes honey that tastes great for them and the other aphid type with honey not that great but it secrets something onto plants which delays flowering and thus prevents plants from dying off earlier after flowering, thus increasing the value ants extracts from a plant. Think for a moment the steps involved from discovering aphids. They are brilliant!
- YCode 10y agoI don't know if understanding is the right word to use. Over time the ants have acquired a series of triggers and actions that have (apparently) made them more fit to survive. They don't necessarily understand that for example that planting and fertilizing seeds will yield a safe place to live, they are just driven to take those actions when they encounter whatever trigger those seeds activate in them. For example when an ant dies it puts off oleic acid and when others pick up on this scent they cart if off to a "burial" site. However the ants don't understand death. If you coat a live ant with oleic acid the ants will carry it off even as it resists and tries to clean itself and dump it in the dead pile. Collective intelligence is a strange concept to work with because the ant isn't really the animal, the animal is the colony. Even still I don't know that the colony "understands" what is happening, it just feels a collective drive to take the actions.
- mountainplus 10y agoWhether it is innateness or something entirely different I wouldn't know. But ants are certainly one of the most intriguing subjects I like to read about. To anyone who's interested in paths, ants, and some similar musings, I'd recommend Robert Moor's book: On Trails (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27276431-on-trails http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27276431-on-trails).
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoI'm surprised there isn't a mention of caffeine in the article linked here. Caffeine is an insecticide, and I'm willing to bet it plays a role in this relationship by providing ant housing that other insects find generally unpalatable to be around. This bit seems odd: "This is the first ant to build its own home," says Susanne Renner, a botanist from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Surely this is a misquote or otherwise out of context, because it's obviously not true.
- liqu0rice 10y agoShould read: "This is the first ant to plant its future home."
- goda90 10y agoI'm curious if its the first animal to plant its future home too.
- peller 10y agoEven that doesn't appear to be true, though: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/on-fiji-ants-have-learned-to-grow-plants-to-house-their-massive-colonies/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/on-fiji-ants-have-lea... EDIT: I'm dumb, same ants.
- liqu0rice 10y agoSame research.
- ndonnellan 10y agoThis DW article seems to be a poor regurgitation of the arstechnica one (which includes the proper link to the research).
- wyclif 10y agoEven ants know that coffee is for closers.
- logingone 10y agoDoes anyone here have an ant farm? Worthwhile? Interesting species?
- tnjm 10y agoIt's continually frustrating that articles like this don't link to the original research. In the age of Sci-Hub, research is so much more accessible than ever before. More non-academic traffic to publishers' sites might even encourage them to offer sensible legal ways of getting hold of papers too, as JSTOR have. I couldn't immediately find a DOI for this -- it's possible, of course, that it's unpublished (it sounds like PhD work). That would be useful to know, too, though.
- has2k1 10y agoWhat I find interesting and not mentioned in the article is the implications that follow from the fact that coffee is not native to Fiji. So, either the ants came with the coffee to Fiji having perfected the art in a different location. Or despite it so, that both species are 3 million years old, this behaviour is only a few hundred years old.
- KMag 10y agoI was wondering the same thing. My first thought was that perhaps here "coffee" is being used in this popular press article as a shorthand for a relative of the coffee plant, but I haven't been curious enough to dig up the five "coffee" species names and research them. I'm not particularly knowledgable about coffee (I'm not even sure if arabica is a sub-species or proper species), but I would be surprised if there are 5 proper species of coffee used commercially.
- detaro 10y agoThere are a lot of species in the genus Coffea, and multiple ones (not sure how many) are used commercially, but the vast vast majority (probably >98%) on the market is either robusta or arabica (which are different species).
- gmoes 10y agoIf you are interested in this topic I would highly recommend The Ants by E.O. Wilson Bert Holldobler. I was lucky enough to observe ant symbiosis in my yard. Their book helped me understand what I saw. I did a write up of it here: http://www.elegantcoding.com/2016/05/my-ant-symbiosis-stories_31.html http://www.elegantcoding.com/2016/05/my-ant-symbiosis-storie...
- johnohara 10y agoFTA: "Ants live symbiotically with other animals as well as plants. For example, 'herder' ants take care of aphids, defending them against ladybirds and 'milking' them." From Feynman's "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" on the how it might be possible to miniaturize manufacturing: "What I would like to suggest is the possibility of training an ant to train a mite to do this."
- has2k1 10y agoYou are heading towards a search algorithm. That is, a search for the right incentives/disincentives for possibly all of the biological organisms that make up the manufacturing stack. Then the question becomes can you purchase enough Time which is perhaps the key ingredient in search problems.
- johnohara 10y agoTo be accurate, those are Feynman's words, not mine. Taken from the talk he gave in 1959. He was discussing how to manufacture at the smallest levels. I thought them prescient when I read the "milking" statement in the article.
- has2k1 10y agoWhen I read the transcript of that talk some years ago, I spent some time trying to come to grips with how trans-formative the idea was.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoIn other news, squirrels plant oak trees (then live in them) and bees pollinate their own food source.
- lubonay 10y agoWho would've guessed that ant makes java in nature as well!
- dghughes 10y agoI thought it was interesting that the ants and the coffee plant are both three million years old. Imagine if the ants were a bit older if so I wonder if it would be possible they created the coffee plant through selective breeding.
- cheeze 10y agoMods, can we update the link here with the non-mobile version? http://www.dw.com/en/ant-species-cultivates-coffee-for-accommodation/a-36477533 http://www.dw.com/en/ant-species-cultivates-coffee-for-accom... Thanks!
- ChuckMcM 10y agoBoy would I love to own that Starbucks franchise! More seriously though, ants are an interesting mechanism. As a kid I watched them farm aphids on my parent's tomato plants. That really amazed me. It is interesting that in the Bay Area at least nearly all of the native species of ant are being out competed by the Argentine ants. As far as I can tell the Argentine ants don't cultivate things.