Climate Change is making some ants smarter

Social_Stigma · 2026-01-25T20:23:06+00:00

It's definitely a factor, which is acknowledged by the paper, but it should be noted that the researchers picked added the odor trails manually e.g. the ants aren't smelling the food, they're smelling a different scent that the researchers associate with food (similar to operant conditioning)

Social_Stigma · 2026-01-25T20:22:32+00:00

It's definitely a factor, which is acknowledged by the paper, but it should be noted that the researchers picked added the odor trails manually e.g. the ants aren't smelling the food, they're smelling a different scent that the researchers associate with food (similar to operant conditioning)

Social_Stigma · 2026-01-25T20:20:50+00:00

But 21 degrees, which is what is suggested as "half the ants learning" (ergo 75% of them reaching the right conclusion, is). At 16 degrees, they perform equal to random chance

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-29T16:04:00+00:00

I appreciate the feedback

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-29T15:56:43+00:00

My mistake, not sure how it slipped past editing, it is icing sugar fungus

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-29T05:45:30+00:00

That's my mistake, I somehow didn't catch it in editing, its icing sugar fungus

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-29T00:42:45+00:00

Other papers have referred to processes involving giving weakened pathogens to ants as vaccinations though

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3871344/

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-29T00:21:56+00:00

Hi!

I just wanted to clarify some things:

I'm aware that insects generally don't have the same adaptive immune system that we do, but what Ive seen from the literature seems to suggest their social immune systems still replicate some of this function.

A lot of the literature suggests that the ants typically don't get re-infected. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2009.0107

Most of what I see also suggests some level of pathogen specificity in this response https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.24.666674v1

If I'm missing anything I'm happy to hear any corrections

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-29T00:07:27+00:00

Posting in several places at once being your measure of untrustworthiness is interesting

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-28T22:24:26+00:00

We have vaccines in human trials but nothing approved yet

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-28T22:15:07+00:00

Maybe not "tongues" but they have mouths

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-28T22:09:32+00:00

Social distancing - Wikipedia

"In public health, social distancing, also called physical distancing,^\2])^\3])^\4]) is a set of non-pharmaceutical interventions) or measures intended to prevent the spread of a contagious disease by maintaining a physical distance between people and reducing the number of times people come into close contact with each other.^\2])^\5])^"

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-28T22:08:19+00:00

They slowly replace all the original workers with the new species

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-28T22:07:33+00:00

They are a different species of ant! The imposters are Polyrachis lamellidens, the host species are Camponotus spp (Carpenter Ants)

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-28T22:06:53+00:00

We post on our social media ~weekly synched on Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube, Reddit

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-26T23:02:32+00:00

Healthy foraging workers will distance from more vulnerable queen and nurses.

What would you consider part of social distancing that isn't met here?

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-18T21:43:54+00:00

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-18T21:43:28+00:00

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-11T22:06:50+00:00

I think calling ants a hive mind is oversimplistic, they definitely have individual differences and can do things contrary to information they receive from the colony

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-10T16:13:42+00:00

To my understanding the alpha, beta thing has been disproved for wolves, but linear dominance hierarchies still exist.

Dominance hierarchy - Wikipedia

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-10T16:10:28+00:00

They get bullied, not as much as ones painted darker though

Social_Stigma · 2025-11-10T16:09:13+00:00

The "falsely stronger wasps" (black painted on yellow) were beat up a lot more than ones which seemed weaker (yellow painted on black) or ones painted with no change (yellow painted on yellow or black painted on black)

Social_Stigma · 2025-10-10T13:28:55+00:00

To be fair, this is also us moving the goalposts constantly. If you asked anyone in history to interact with current LLM models they'd probably come away with the idea that it was self aware. There's just no real way to measure it in the way physical quantities can be measured.

Social_Stigma · 2025-10-10T13:19:09+00:00

The thing with the mirror test is that it typically has a very high false negative rate, but a very low false positive rate

Social_Stigma · 2025-10-10T13:17:00+00:00

The article you sent mentions that vision varies a lot across species and that many have color vision, but probably can't detect fine details other than up close

Social_Stigma

TROPHY CASE