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Ant colonies have a complex social structure. Ants’ jobs are determined and can be changed by age. As ants grow older their jobs move them farther from the queen, or center of the colony. Younger ants work within the nest protecting the queen and young. Sometimes, a queen is not present and is replaced by egg-laying workers.
Because of this, ants are a popular source of inspiration for design in software engineering, robotics, industrial design, and other fields involving many simple parts working together to perform complex tasks. [2] The most popular current model of self-organization in ants and other social insects is the response threshold model.
Ants communicating through touch. Ant communication in most species involves pheromones, which is a method using chemical trails for other ants or insects to find and follow. [1] However, ants of some species can communicate without using pheromones or chemical trails in general.
The army ants of South America, such as the Eciton burchellii species, and the driver ants of Africa do not build permanent nests, but instead, alternate between nomadism and stages where the workers form a temporary nest from their own bodies, by holding each other together.
Temnothorax albipennis of all ages are able to participate in tandem running, but experienced individuals are more likely to do so. Older experienced ants are also more likely to lead slowly and be precise. Young inexperienced ants are capable of leading and following in tandem runs, but they lead faster and are less accurate. [12]
The queen does not give direct orders and does not tell the ants what to do. [citation needed] Instead, each ant reacts to stimuli in the form of chemical scents from larvae, other ants, intruders, food and buildup of waste, and leaves behind a chemical trail, which, in turn, provides a stimulus to other ants. Here each ant is an autonomous ...
In contrast, multicoloniality is the common characteristic of ants to show all colonies being aggressive to each other, including different colonies of the same species. A supercolony would be a large aggregation of nests of a species that normally would exhibit multicoloniality, but in the case of a supercolony has all workers from all ...
Two ants fighting over a dead wasp. Wars or conflicts can break out between different groups in some ant species for a variety of reasons. These violent confrontations typically involve entire colonies, sometimes allied with each other, and can end in a stalemate, the complete destruction of one of the belligerents, the migration of one of the groups, or, in some cases, the establishment of ...