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Ants really are incredible. Not only do they farm aphids, they also farm fungus. Leafcutter ants bring the leaves to their fungus farm. Then they eat the fungu
by ants_everywhere 3y ago
Ants really are incredible.
Not only do they farm aphids, they also farm fungus. Leafcutter ants bring the leaves to their fungus farm. Then they eat the fungus.
So ants farm both livestock and crops.
They also form super colonies.
- datameta 3y agoThat's an obscene cognition/cooperation to body weight ratio.
- eigenket 3y agoI would guess(without much evidence) that you don't need much cognition in each individual ant. You can get very complex behaviours out of very simple rules in idealised systems like cellular automata. My bias (for essentially aesthetic reasons) is to assume that each ant is basically pretty dumb, and the cool complex behaviors happen as an emergent property of how they respond to the stimuli they recieve (especially all the pheromone messages they get from other ants).
- hdyddbbbbbb 3y ago[dead]
- datameta 3y agoI have a similar hunch. They seem to be a distributed sensor, compute, and actuator network.
- SCM-Enthusiast 3y ago>each ant is basically pretty dumb, and the cool complex behaviors happen as an emergent property of how they respond to the stimuli they recieve (especially all the pheromone messages they get from other ants). Can't ants be swapped out as humans here?
- 20after4 3y agoThey farm MY crops. Little bastards. >D