Ants Exhibit Memory-Based Aggression Towards Rivals

Don't Cross Ants – They Remember Their Enemies And Hold Grudges

Antman doesn’t seem like such an unscary superhero now, huh?

Evolutionary biology: Ants can hold a grudge

Evolutionary biologists are investigating the extent to which ants learn from past experiences. After being attacked by ants from a particular nest, ants behave more aggressively towards others from that same nest.

Much is predetermined in the life of an insect colony. This is why a study is surprising: Ants remember who they had trouble with. In other words, they learn from experience.

Even ants may hold grudges

It’s not just humans who have trouble making amends—Earth’s 20 quadrillion ants aren’t quick to forgive, either. Ants primarily rely on their fine-tuned olfactory sense to differentiate between the smell of members of their own family (i.e. safe ants) and ants from other colonies. A familiar scent while out foraging, for example, allows a worker ant to know which nearby ants are there to help, and which may be rivals hunting for the same resourc…

Ants hold grudges, study suggests

A team of evolutionary biologists has demonstrated that ants learn from experience. Led by Dr. Volker Nehring, research associate in the Evolutionary Biology and Animal Ecology group at the University of Freiburg, and doctoral student Mélanie Bey, the team repeatedly confronted ants with competitors from another nest. The test ants remembered the negative experiences they had during these encounters.

There are only two types of animals capable of transporting an object so large that they can only succeed in cooperating and going to one: humans and ants. And not all 15,000 species of formicides know how to do something like this. Only 1% are able to work as a team to get a piece of T-shaped through two narrow doors very close together. The experiment is typical of computer science and artificial intelligence, but a group of entomologists have…