/bees/eusocial insect colonies
I made this thread to avoid derailing the other one since obviously it is a rather niche topic that many people might not find interest in. I appreciate the responses tore gave me to my drunken rambling question in the Stupid Questions thread. It was a lot more than I was expecting. So I figured I would go ahead and make this thread.
If a mod or someone wanted to move the relevant posts from that thread to this one it might make it easier to follow.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Guybrush
Keeping it a bit simple and ignoring things like mDNA, siblings from same parents could theoretically be 0% related (they got the other half from each parent) to 100% related. On average, they will be about 50% related.
For hymenopterans, it's not like this. What makes a male a male is that he is haploid - he has only one set of chromosomes and half the total of his diploid mother or sisters. His mother, the queen, doesn't even need a father to produce males, hence them missing the father part of the chromosomes.
When the queen has sex with a male, he only has one set of chromosomes to pass down. Every one of his sperms will be the same. That means that his daughters will always contain the same set of chromosomes from dad and be at least 50% related. Then they will also share some of the genes that mom pass down, on average 50% of those. Mom's contribution is 50% of the chromosomes, so 50% of 50% is 25%.
This means female worker bees/ants are on average 75% related.
If a worker bee would have a child of her own, she would only be 50% related to it. But if her mom produces another sister, that sister will be 75% related to her. So from the perspective of the selfish genes that inhabit a worker bee, it makes more sense in terms of fitness benefit to make sure the queen produces more siblings. It's better than sex. Hence, what may look like altruism is just selfishness in disguise and something that can lead to a high level of cooperation. Even if the worker bee dies, she can potentially have a huge fitness gain if her sacrifice ensured mom's continued baby making.
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That's interesting and i honestly hadn't gotten into the specific math behind the genetics involved but my general impression initially was that the entire colony exists essentially as an extension of the queen. As I understand it, basically the queen is the reproducing agent and the workers exist only to assist in said reproduction. Though depending on the species this distinction can be more or less clear than in others.
In some species, IIRC, the other females aren't even sterile they just tend not to reproduce. I remember seeing a documentary where there were some worker ants in such a colony that would attempt to start laying their own eggs and they would be physically restrained and prevented from doing so by other worker ants. Then there are even more erusocial species of ants where the other female worker and soldier ants are just sterile and physically incapable of reproducing directly. In these species, the existence of the entire colony as an extension of the queen's reproduction apparatus seems more pronounced.
Now I'm seeing documentaries where there are super colonies that adopt multiple queens cohabitating and combining resources despite not being related genetically. The strategic advantages of these kinds of super colonies can be staggering. The kinds of numbers that can be produced can completely decimate any rival colonies nearby.
Essentially, ants have a specific scent based on certain pheromones that allow them to detect members of the same colony vs rival colonies. Typically if two ants from seperate colonies come into contact a war will ensure, even if they are the same species. But now there are super colonies where that isn't happening. Either they aren't acknowledging the scent or the scent is being altered somehow to be similar - I can't remember the exact mechanics of it but essentially the result is the colonies don't go to war and instead start cooperating as if they were members of the same colony.
The reason why i even gained such an interest in ants in the first place is not even due to the genetic factor of how traits are selected for but rather just down to the nature of intelligence in a colony. I think the term is collective swarm intelligence. They make decisions as a colony not based on a top down hierarchy, but from disparate nodes on a network sending signals to one another that allow the colony as a whole to function.
As such, the individual is dispensable. This is why they look so alien to us. They have a sophisticated intelligence with no conscious agent. They can make complex decisions as a colony that no individual ant can make. An individual ant is little more than a robot programmed through evolution to sustain the colony. That is how I conceptualize it at least. I'm not a scientist.
In fact I was watching a documentary last night where a supercolony of wood ants with multiple queens, some of the queen ants being dragged back down into the nest against their will. The queen doesn't call the shots. The colony acts as a collective entity more akin to an organism.
That once again highlights my interest with regard to the nature of intelligence. I think as humans we have a certain bias towards our own type of intelligence which is based on advanced cognition in a single individual that is capable of perceiving the world in very complex ways.
It seems very unlikely there is anything that could be construed as any sort of advanced 'perception' when speaking about ants. Individually the cognitive processes must be very primitive compared to higher-order mammals etc.
Yet in terms of the capacity to make complex decisions with a high degree of flexibility and adaptability such as where to find food, where and how to make a nest and regulate everything from its temperature to the resources necessary to keep it thriving, these colonies obviously display a certain level of intelligence that is not even reliant on what we would conceptualize as perception.
Such as in the case of the wood ant colony referenced above, the entire colony was sunbathing in order to harvest heat from the sun to bring back down into the nest in order to regulate the temperature. That is why the queens were brought out in the open and once they were warm enough, were brought back under whether they wanted to go willingly or not.
Maybe this decentralized structure is what makes them so resilient. In any case it's something that attracts my interest as it presents a sort of polar opposite approach to intelligence as opposed to the way human beings approach it.
To us, the idea of creating let's say an advanced AI is pretty much synonymous with creating an entity that is capable of the same sort of individualized cognition that human beings are capable of. We hardly even consider the prospect of disparate nodes on a network that are more or less completely unaware and primitive in terms of intelligence on an individual level but collectively allow for the emergent property of an advanced yet unconscious form of intelligence to manifest.