Camp? O not us, fellah!
Ant career path: you might be working for a big old queen, but at least there are no pointy-haired bosses.
Ants have careers; you don't want them
Ants don't have a career ladder, they have a career hole, and only the wiliest of the insects can avoid falling down it according to the latest research. A particular genus of carpenter ants (Camponotus fellah) exist in a complex social structure, where their first jobs see them caring for the queen and her offspring, and as …
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Friday 19th April 2013 22:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Its reminds me that we're all just Ants in the larger schema of things...
"...where their first jobs see them caring for the queen and her offspring, and as the ants age many of them wind up working at more and more of a distance from the big cheese..."
...Sounds like working for a tech start-up....
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Monday 22nd April 2013 13:48 GMT Psyx
Re: If you had to work close to her fat highness
Personally, I always view getting further away from the boss as a promotion!
I seem to recall that some species of ants very much have a career dead-end, with a handful (probably not literally) of older ants staying outside the nest each night during colder weather in order to seal the nest shut overnight so that it keeps warm... thus condemning themselves to dying of exposure.
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Friday 19th April 2013 23:20 GMT Don Jefe
They Were Tired
The sensors were made with a printer & weighed up to 18% of the ants body weight! That's impressive for constantly carrying around. The entire tracking system is described here (PDF) http://m.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2013/04/17/science.1234316.DC1/Mersch.SM.pdf
It is a pretty cool read.
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Saturday 20th April 2013 06:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Mirror mirror on the wall
The assumption that stay-at-home proximity to the queen coupled with constant interaction with other ants in an environment of total darkness represents the pinnacle of career achievement —while working at a distance from the colony, in daylight, with less fellow-ant contact is the nadir —seems back-to-front to me.
Really the colony is mirroring human society:
The younger ants are celebrity obsessed, constantly social networking and blindly accepting whatever they are fed in from the outside world. The older ants are more independent, more aware of the world outside, are able to work autonomously and can figure out things for themselves.
When I was a larva it was all green fields round here!
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Saturday 20th April 2013 19:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Could it be because foraging is more dangerous?
Also it's a task many orders more complex? Brooding can be taught through imitation. Foraging is risking, and if you can learn the first, you can learn foraging. But if you can't learn foraging, you might not get the chance to backtrack career wise to the brood. Cleaning also lets you get near the "outside" without having the venture far. So small steps and in at the shallow end.
So while they are required to "hit the ground running" they are not thrown in at the deep end to drown... so this sounds a little less than the current business strategy? ;)
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Sunday 21st April 2013 01:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Ant ageing
@m a d r a Good one ! Are the young queen-tending ones called sycoph-ants?
Maybe there's ant loyalty being burned into their young impressionable ant brains (chemically and/or through ant neural networks), so they're not going to become rebellious or other ant-isocial behaviors later.
More likely the outward flow of ants from the queen is about disease control. If you're a sick ant, it's rubbish duty for you. So they keep an ant-iseptic environment around the queen.
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Monday 22nd April 2013 09:46 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Re: Maybe the queen just likes having all the hot-looking young ants to herself?
And the young'uns like to be near the queen of course. To paraphrase Loudon Wainwright III
"The cutest ant that I have ever seen
is our own big fat sexy queen!
True she hasn't got such great legs,
but you should see the girl lay eggs!"
Mine's the one with the dead skunk print on the back.
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Sunday 21st April 2013 16:55 GMT TurboSwami
I feel so much of our own society could benefit from mirroring the model seen in insect social structure. Collectivism over competition--cooperation and altruism are evolutionarily advantageous over selfish individualism. The multicellular organization of our own bodies can be seen as evidence of this.
It makes sense that those members of society who are reaching their "prime" would be given the most important and sensitive roles of the collective. Not to diminish the importance of accrued experience, but, for certain specializations, those individuals reaching the height of their physical and mental capacities are best able to serve the greater good. This is as true in carpenter ant colonies as it is in Tokyo, Japan.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
