Studying Ants

A few days ago my girfriend and I went to Glaskogen, a wonderful, wild little forest with 80 lakes in Sweden. It was mushroom time and the mosquitoes had not survived the chilly nights. We slept comfy in the car.

Resting after a long walk, I saw an ant dragging another ant. "He's hauling a corpse to the nest", I thought. But at closer inspection, one ant had the leg of the other between his mandibles, without showing signs of wanting to chew it off. The dragging ant seemed to hardly notice the draggee, but it slowed him down considerably.

I wondered what was going on. Both ants seemed of the same species. Both could easily cut off the other's limbs in a jiffy, yet they seemed pretty OK with the whole thing. One was carefully grabbing the other by the leg, and the other did nothing much else but trying to drag along.

I wondered why the ant kept holding on to that other ant's leg. And why that other ant didn't lose its patience and chew its own leg off, or - better yet - the other ant's head.

Then I saw it: The leg-locked ant started to cleanse his counterpart of lice, or so it seemed. Apparently, the other ant couldn't rid all of his body by itself. It would perhaps succumb to the infestation, if the parasites weren't eventually removed.

So these ants apparently needed some encouragement in the form of an annoying slowdown, for them to help their fellow ant. Things went according to rational rules. A simple, elegant solution. I marveled at the seemingly complex behavior, displayed by such a modest configuration of neurons. And I wondered what else I might discover, if I only had more time to study the ants.