Ants release chemicals when they die that attract other ants, to fight off the threat. This is annoying, because squishing an ant that bit you is likely to attract more bitey ants.
Do ants have a chemical signal for “all ye who enter here, either turn back or abandon all hope”? Can you teach a hive to fear a certain place? Or do they just keep coming forever?
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It sounds silly, but this is literally the basis for most research. Ask a seemingly simple question you don’t know the answer to, quickly realize that it’s a lot more complicated than it sounds, search journals for existing research in the area and find it lacking, write up a proposal and convince someone to fund you, do a lot of experiments, and if you don’t go crazy or run out of funding, write a paper about it and submit it to journals for peer review.
I wish you good luck!
I’m no entomologist, but man this sounds like fun. Now you’ve got me imagining making a career out of taking what is essentially shower thought questions and running with them.
Well shoot - nobody’s an entomologist until someone hires them to look at bugs. You can be a freelance entomologist all you want. Nobody can stop you.
HEY ANTS!
This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
I personally feel like we should institute a priesthood of ant-scarers in addition to signage warning them of the honorless dangers.
Ant from colony JK4930-1 here, apologies, we were mislead by “Here be food” pheromones, we will turn back now
Fear is an emotion, and we can’t know about whether animals (or depending on where you fall on the qualia debate, other humans) feel that emotion. We can measure their behavior, though, and there are a great many studies on animal fear and avoidance behaviors, including ants.
Ants don’t have a memory in the sense that you or I think of. There is no collective memory of “avoid that place” that lives in the minds of ants or a hive because some ants had a bad time in that place, as far as we can tell. However ants deposit pheromones as they navigate the world. Other ants follow along later and maintain or update these pheromone “trails” (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4590477/). Ant pheromone signaling is a deep body of research but there are both positive (go this way) and negative (don’t go this way) signals.
Ants have a memory. Their memory is written on the world in pheromones. Just like human memory is kept in books.
Human memory is kept in our brains. You’re using precise words - like memory - imprecisely
This is a beautiful and clever question, and the answer is: Yes.
Ants are able to learn to avoid places where something bad happens. In the following study, people tried to teach ants not to follow their own pheromones with positive meaning by giving them electric shocks (evil crazy scientists). They were able to teach them to ignore the signals (not to avoid them altogether though). It’s kind of a big deal, because these pheromones are normally telling them to follow them, so for the ants not to obey that is a big behavioral change.
It also tells us that electric shocks are efficient agaist ants 😉
Ants don’t like cinnamon, of that’s worth anything. Sugar ants don’t, at least; I don’t know how fire ants feel about it.
You are actually asking two questions, both rather complicated.
- Is there a chemical that induces avoidance in ants (or at least some ant species)?
- Can you teach ants to avoid an odor.
After a quick glance at the literature, I’d say that there are some chemicals that induce avoidance.
But I was frankly too lazy to look into the learning aspect.
