lol

I tried to isolate parts of that video I found interesting but the YouTube clipping sites I was using weren't working and I gave up rather quickly. I've had very little free time lately. I wanted to put in a decent amount of effort into articulating my thoughts on this subject because tore put in a decent amount of effort responding to my initially lazy question. It's not often I get to talk to someone who has any sort of expertise in this topic. I certainly have none and have pieced together my thoughts from various documentaries and YouTube videos. I think maybe he can help me clear up any misconceptions I might have. If him and I are the only ones who end up engaging in this topic I won't exactly be surprised or let down. But thank you for your contribution as always, neo. I'll always consider you my most loyal subscriber. :o:

Yessss fANTastic

Sounds pedANTic

^I'm glad I see other replies, I was afraid this thread would become dormANT.

:beer:

Have you seen this movie? I only saw part of it as a kid. It's about ants.
TRIGGER WARNING: it's no where near a David Attenborough documentary on nature. It's about ants evolving at an alarming rate set on world domination.

Phase IV Trailer (1974)

Nice, jwb!

I don't have time for a lengthy reply atm, but I will comment quickly. I believe the way we talk about ants may be misleading. We call the reproducing females queens which indicate they are rulers. I think that's misleading. Flipping it, one might say the reproductive females are like handmaidens from The Handmaid's Tale. That would be misleading too, but perhaps slightly closer to a truth.

Most biologists would generally say that an anthill is comprised of selfish individuals that cooperate in a way so that everyone benefits. Or even more accurately, a group of cooperating selfish genes that use ants as their vehicles to take them into the future. This is generally what you would expect to emerge from natural selection.

Where that is not readily apparent and animals seem to act in an altruistic manner, there generally are interesting explanations why that is, such as the aforementioned haplodiploidi. A gene that increases the fitness of other genes at the expense of its own fitness will get weeded out over time by natural selection. Hence, altruism, while it may appear for various reasons, is not stable, but selfishness is. For general evolutionary theory, that should be the basic expectation. What looks like altruism tends to be either selfishness in disguise, a misplaced gamble or a selfish strategy in a situation which it is no longer ideally adapted to, making it altruistic and unstable.

For ants, science seem to say their ancestors were monogamous and this (along with haplodiploidity and a few other factors) would promote evolution into eusociality. When polygamy arises as a later characteristic, it can mean that eusociality is no longer stable and that these colonies are in fact being invaded and disrupted by selfish, exploitative strategies as we speak. This is quite common and I'll write a little more about that in another post, I think.

I haven't seen the documentary you've seen, but I do believe that if it is about eusociality/cooperation, then the story it tells may possibly be a little skewed and not tell the full picture.

I would be grateful if perhaps Marie or another mod could move my posts over from the Stupidest questions thread :)

done :beer:

Are these really the best puns musicbANTer can come up with?

Hey buddy wanna argue about cANTSel culture?

I think some of the confusion comes from the language being used. To describe 'genes' as selfish is very different than to describe a person as selfish. Yet the later is the way we understand that term colloquially.

Like for example EO Wilson brings up how ants are programmed to leave the nest and die alone if they are injured, to no longer burden the colony with maintaining their existence. This is the exact opposite of what humans refer to as selfishness if you are breaking it down based on the best interest of the individual. It's clearly not in that individual ant's best interest. It's a sacrificial act that benefits the colony as a whole. You might say it benefits the specific genes the ant is carrying but then again, genes have no real agency and thus when we describe them as "selfish" it means something very different from the common parlance.




I have to say I'm not that clear on the distinction between monogamy and polygamy in ants. As far as I understand one queen typically lays all the eggs so are you saying that in the case of polygamous ants she is impregnated by multiple drones and lays eggs from each of them??? Or how does that work?

don't ANTagonise me pal

unrelated fun fact: the Dutch word for nitpicking literally translates as antf*cking and I think it's a shame other languages haven't followed that excellant example

so basically ant queens are huge sluts, which means they're also Queen of Thots? My cosmic connection to ants gets stronger the more I learn about them