Social insects, who were considered incredibly hardworking and set as an example, turned out to be overwhelmingly parasites.
Oh, how wrong Ivan Andreevich was …
Not everyone in the anthill is engaged in any kind of socially useful work. As it may seem. The vanity that catches your eye is an optical illusion. In fact, less than 3 percent of insects work tirelessly and without unbending their backs, as they say. The rest are not at all zealous: they either imitate vigorous activity, or are lazy, or do nothing at all.
The abundance of idle idlers among ants - the very insects whose hard work we did not doubt, which is reflected in proverbs, sayings, fables and cartoons, amazed scientists from the University of Arizona (UA). They couldn't believe their eyes. However, two weeks of observing five colonies convinced us that laziness in anthills is a common occurrence. Moreover, it is characteristic. Almost like humans.
Distribution of workers, light workers and parasites in the ant colony.
Such drum ants as the hero of Ivan Andreevich Krylov's fable, of course, come across. But extremely rare. Most would be ashamed to cynically ask the carefree dragonfly hopping, "Did you work in the summer?" and send her to dance. Themselves like that.
The authors of the study are Professor Anna Dornhaus and her graduate student Daniel Charbonneau. Social media users call their results one of the most significant in the past decade. They assure that they are shocking almost as much as the truth about Santa Claus.
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There is no Santa Claus, and the ants are not hardworking. What's left to believe? Into the bees? Or are they also wrong?
American scientists made their discouraging discovery 4 years ago while studying the Temnothorax ants. They marked hard workers, lazy people and idlers with paints of different colors. Not to be confused. They filmed non-stop with a micro-camera on video in an attempt to understand their labor relationship. Sorted it out, but not right away. And not in everything.
Labor reserves and just reserves
At first, scientists suggested that ants work in shifts - for a day or three, for example. Or alternating day and night. Or they have some kind of rotational method. Nothing like this. As it turned out, the hard workers worked without any "days off" at all. And the lazy people did not betray themselves - they did not interrupt for work. Moreover, they ate off the abdomen.
We also checked another hypothesis: maybe the idleness of ants is fake? They cover something very important - for example, the fact that they are members of some secret special service, the intricacies of which the observers have not yet grasped. But this was not confirmed.
One secret was revealed after entomologists guessed to remove from the colony a certain number of hardworking individuals - about 20 percent. Their places were gradually taken by the former parasites, who in two weeks mastered the necessary specialties. As a result, the work according to the "staffing table" was getting better.
Thus, entomologists decided, lazy people and idlers represent a kind of society "Labor Reserves", whose members replenish the Stakhanovist ants who left for one reason or another. This strategy helps the colony to survive and recover from crises and natural disasters.
By the way, people sometimes become like ants - in the sense of attracting labor reserves. Recall that in the era of developed socialism, this was generally in the order of things: the place of the missing workers in vegetable warehouses was taken by idle intellectuals. I took it myself several times a year. And like that ant in two weeks, or even earlier, mastered the specialty of a cabbage or carrot sorter.
And when scientists simulated a crisis for the ants - they limited them in nutrition, they revealed the second secret. First, the fat lazy men began to feed the hard workers, extracting food from their abdomens - a kind of NZ. And then they began to lay food - the so-called trophic eggs, which, again, fed the hungry workaholics. It seems that there are no analogues of such charitable activities in human colonies. Unless, of course, we do not take into account the rare cases when corrupt officials and other money-givers of unearned income forcibly or voluntarily surrendered their fraudulent gains.
It is still unknown who and how divides ants into active and reserve ones? Where do lazy people get commands to get started? Or vice versa. Finish it?
Scientists continue their research. And they reported on the results already available as they were received - first in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, and then in the Journal of Bioeconomics.
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Idle ants become revolutionaries
The German biologists Alexandra Achenbach and Susanne Foitzik from the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich discovered the people's liberation movement among ants. The object of their study was the ant colonies of the species Protomognathus americanus and Temnothorax. Some of them regularly attack others - our acquaintances, honored entirely consisting of those same idlers who studied the Americans from the University of Arizona. Let's conditionally call the enslavers "Pro", and the enslaved "Tem".
During brutal raids "Pro" kill all adults from the genus "Tem", destroy all their larva-pupae. And young ants are taken prisoner and driven into slavery. The enslaved begin to do all the dirty work in the owners' anthill, take care of their larvae, and get food.
Some of the hijacked become a kind of Vlasovites - they participate in punitive operations together with "Pro" and brutally kill their fellows.
Previously, it was believed that prisoners fall into slavery for life. Alexandra and Suzanne saw that it was not. Several times they witnessed a slave uprising. "Tem" waited for the next "Pro" brood to pupate. The queen and almost all the larvae were killed. And they dealt first of all with those of which the queens would later grow.
Women believe that such uprisings lead to the fact that the number of slave owners is greatly reduced. And they no longer have enough strength and resources for new raids. This, they say, is the meaning of the ants' liberation struggle.
According to the researchers, it happens that slaves manage to completely seize power in the anthill of the slave owners. And become its masters.
Most of the revolutionaries, I suppose, are former lazy people and idlers. And who else, if they are the majority? What is not the third secret of the purpose of seemingly useless individuals?
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY