God Awful Things

So, back in September we wondered “Hey! Are there lazy ants?”

and we discovered.. “Yes, there are.”

Today we find out via The Daily Yomiuri that they even play an important role.

In a colony of ants, even “lazy” workers play an important role in providing stable labor power to maintain the colony, according to a study by a group led by associate Prof. Eisuke Hasegawa of Hokkaido University.

After identifying “hard” and “lazy” workers and then creating new colonies that had a different ratio of the two characteristics, each colony quickly regrouped into “hard” and “lazy” teams at almost the same ratio as the colony they had come from, Hasegawa reported at the Japan Ethological Society’s meeting Saturday in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture.

Hasegawa said the group found that ants are likely to strategically act to minimize the time when no ants are working to ensure a stable labor force and maintain the colony.

Over a one-month period, the study group observed eight colonies of myrmica kotokui, an ant that can be found across the nation. The researchers marked each ant and observed how much they worked for their colonies, such as taking care of larvae and repairing their nests.

After that, they classed the ants as “hard” or “lazy” workers and created new colonies with different ratios of the two types. About the same ratio of both categories soon appeared in the respective new colonies.

A computer simulation found that a colony with lazy ants had fewer periods when no ants were working than a colony without lazy ants.

“Any halt to the nursing of larvae and eggs means a colony’s extinction,” Hasegawa said. “Ants, therefore, seem to build a working system in which they intentionally work in a different manner.”

The more you know, indeed.