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I have worked with ants specifically fragmentation of ant colonies. I would say the responses to isolation are much more severe than human isolation. If an indi
by pks016 6y ago
I have worked with ants specifically fragmentation of ant colonies. I would say the responses to isolation are much more severe than human isolation. If an individual ant get separated from the colony, it will just die (Mostly). Also they usually can't join other ant colonies because of colony specific odor/hydrocarbon.
- k_sze 6y agoA counter anecdatum: I have been keeping a lone, unmated Pseudoneoponera rufipes queen since August 2020. Since she is unmated, she cannot produce any worker. She just keeps eating all the eggs she lays after a few days. I keep her in a test tube nest and feed her fruit flies. She's still alive and kicking as of this writing. And she still has hunter instincts when I give her a weakened, but live little fly. Maybe queens are more resilient to solitude?
- pks016 6y agoDefinitely.Queen can produce the whole colony. She is more resilient than workers and vital part of the colony. Depending on the species, they can live longer or shorter but like the article says the life won't be smooth.
- amelius 6y agoSo, cruel experiment.
- op03 6y agoThe Buddha was pretty much a queen.
- rsync 6y ago"A counter anecdatum: I have been keeping a lone, unmated Pseudoneoponera rufipes queen since August 2020." Aren't you comparing very unlike things ? Specifically, your queen is roughly analogous to an individual, as we think of it. Your parent speaks of a worker ant that is more analogous to an individuals toe or tastebud or something like that ... To put it another way, you have one "ant" (a colony of one individual). Your parent has zero ant (colonies).
- coldtea 6y agoThe ants, queen or regular worker, are all complete organisms, so the explanation falls short. Just that the queen is more used to live in isolation (some ant species/colonies just have a single queen ant), whereas the workers are more used to cooperation and collective existance.
- rsync 6y ago"The ants, queen or regular worker, are all complete organisms, so the explanation falls short." Yes, but they are not "individuals" as we commonly reference. It's loose, but the best analogy for an human individual is the queen ant/bee/termite and the entire hive, or nest - with all the workers, etc. - are part of that queens own "extended phenotype": "After the gene-centered view of evolution was developed in the mid 1970s, non-reproductive individuals were seen as an extended phenotype of the genes, which are the primary beneficiaries of natural selection."[1] An individual worker ant is, to the queen, better thought of as one of your hairs or one of your tastebuds. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality#Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality#Paradox
- User23 6y agoI don't imagine the typical individual human surviving very long under total isolation either.
- rriepe 6y agoIf you adjust for lifespan, we probably do worse overall.
- User23 6y agoI mean more that I suspect the average (sub)urbanite would suffer an Oregon Trail style death inside of three months without access to the things society offers like, for example, antibiotics.
- rriepe 6y agoI'm agreeing. I'm saying the three months is just as bad as (or worse than) their three hours, if you consider that we live for decades and they live for days.