Go To The Lazy Ant You Busy One....

[cronus]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... ZaqDBtVhBc

Lazy ants sit around doing nothing while their nest mates work

Cheer up, lazy bones, you are not alone, even hard-working ant societies have workers that don't quite pull their weight.

"It's just the sort of a thing that anyone who's ever worked on social insects has noticed: 'Oh look, half of them are standing around doing nothing'," says Daniel Charbonneau from the University of Arizona.

Until now it hasn't been clear whether such worker ants of the Temnothorax rugatulus species from the forests of western North America were consistently inactive or merely taking a break. His study shows that they really do have an idler cast.

Charbonneau and his team marked 250 workers from five different colonies and recorded their behaviour at intervals over three days in a lab setting.

They found that almost half spent most of their time immobile, doing no jobs whatsoever. In fact, they were so consistently lazy that it was almost a behaviour in itself, comparable to foraging or taking care of the brood.

(continued)

[pErvinalia]

Like road workers.

[Sean Hayden]

philosophers, probably nihilist

[Brian Peacock]

I used to work in an office like that.

[laklak]

Fucking blodgers.

[DaveDodo007]

Just don't give them Internet access that is all I ask.

[Brian Peacock]

[Sean Hayden]

[pErvinalia]

I love the internet. There's a meme for everything!

[JimC]

"They also serve who only stand and wait..."

(Proving that the devil can quote scripture... )

[mistermack]

Buried away somewhere, there will be a good evolutionary reason for it.

It might be that the lazy ones are fighters, who need to be kept in good condition.
Or reserves, kept in good condition, who can be called on in case of a challenge to the colony.

As the worker ants don't reproduce, it can't be that they individually profit by cheating.
Individual profit by workers doesn't get passed on to their own descendants.
The descendants are descendants of the whole colony, not of individuals.
So having this lazy class of worker must somehow benefit the whole colony.

[Brian Peacock]

Yeah, but your boss never seems to appreciate that when you're late for work... again.

[JimC]

Buried away somewhere, there will be a good evolutionary reason for it.

It might be that the lazy ones are fighters, who need to be kept in good condition.
Or reserves, kept in good condition, who can be called on in case of a challenge to the colony.

As the worker ants don't reproduce, it can't be that they individually profit by cheating.
Individual profit by workers doesn't get passed on to their own descendants.
The descendants are descendants of the whole colony, not of individuals.
So having this lazy class of worker must somehow benefit the whole colony.

Good point.

It would be interesting to compare the % of "idler ants" in different species with different environmental challenges, to see if the proportion varies in some consistent way. For example, if ants in an environment with little need to fight had consistently fewer idlers, that might be informative...

[Brian Peacock]

Or if the idle become active if the population is depleted by a certain factor.

[JimC]

Or if the idle become active if the population is depleted by a certain factor.

Which could be experimentally tested, one imagines.

Remembering always that the devil finds work for idle ants...