This past summer I was having lunch in the park and I inadvertently dropped a small piece of my crab salad on the ground. I had expected half the crowd of nearby ants who were mobbing a different piece of food (presumably it was food but it could have been anything for all I know) to mob it immediately so as to maximize the bounty between all members but to my surprise they continued to do whatever they had been doing and left it alone. Disappointed in my faulty prediction I turned back to my delicious sandwich and continued to eat. A few minutes later I inadvertently cast my eyes to the fallen crab spot again and ALL the ants had moved over from the old morsel, which was still partially there on the ground, to the new one that I had dropped.
What had changed? At this point I can’t say for sure because I missed a good portion of the action, but as soon as the Winter passes I’m going to try the experiment again and in the meantime I’ll make a prediction as to what will happen and why:
Much as in human society I suspect that almost all animals have distinctly different personalities and probably different physical abilities as well, especially animal societies that have many individuals living in close proximity. The simpler explanation I offer for the delayed response was that the crab salad scent took a while to catch the most olfactorily sensitive ant’s attention, but once he (or she) was distracted enough from the current activity, he headed over to investigate the new sensory stimulus and the other ants followed in quick succession.
What I posit as a more likely and more detailed explanation is that several of the ants noticed the new scent more or less simultaneously and stopped what they were doing to consider moving toward the new stimulus. As they began their short trek toward the little-known scent of crab and mayonnaise (I suspect that because I live nowhere near a beach where crab are fished or at least where crab boats dock with their bounty) other ants who were less intrepid or more conformist to the group stayed behind while the percentages were still so tilted. As they saw the intrepid ants enjoying themselves without any apparent danger I maintain that the ants who were less invested in the older bounty, either as a question of taste preference or perhaps because they were lower in social status and couldn’t get as big a share as other higher-ups of the original bounty, then followed the most intrepid ants and finally the most invested ants gave up the old bounty because the numbers were too low for comfort here whereas they were enticingly large over there.
There’s probably no way to test ants for all the psychological properties I’ve attributed to them, but I firmly expect to see what I predicted and will report back in the Spring. Once I’ve replicated that experiment several times I’ll complicate things and drop several new morsels at the same time and see what the distribution pattern of individuals is under those scenarios. Depending on my patience level I might then drop several different new morsels at equal distances to try to determine if they as a group have a favorite taste or if it’s a question of individual taste; and finally I may drop several of the same morsels at differing distances to see what the distribution looks like in that case and whether I can venture a theory as to why.
I know these experiments are not scientifically rigorous but they serve my level of curiosity just fine – someone else can carry out the variety, repetitiveness and rigor of experiments necessary to earn themselves a tenure track at their University J
Then once all the fun and games have been had at the “mini” level, another team can research the microscopic level and perform similar experiments on bacteria and viruses perhaps with the purpose of discovering new strategies to remediate microbe-borne illnesses. Viruses are a tough call but I’m willing to predict that bacteria exhibit personality differences and not simply physical ones when examined in sufficient depth.