Ants are incredible lilliputian beast , get laid peculiarly for their complex societies and teamwork , but we ’ve never quite seen them work together like this . In this video , the speed of the cyberspace meet the deliberateness of the scientific enterprise and discover the limitations of each .
sooner this week , a viral video on the website LiveLeak revealed an unexpected sort of teamwork among ants . In club to cart their millepede prey back to the nest , a grouping of emmet shape a daisy chain , with each ant biting onto the rear of the ant in front of it .
When ant expert Alex Wild come across the video , he did what any expert scientist would do : turn to the literature to see if the peculiar behavior had ever been documented . It had n’t :
… the magazine come out to show an Asian Leptogenys daisy - chain their soundbox in parallel lines to haul off a orotund millipede . I have expend the good morning search the technical lit for mention of this unusual behaviour , and am coming up empty . Some Leptogenys coinage , include L. diminuta , L. nitida , and L. processionalis , are known to forage in group and transfer prey “ hand and glove ” ( root , generator ) . What is stand for by “ cooperative ” is often vague . ( For more , see thisexcellent late review of conjunct transportby Helen McCreery ) . Yet I did n’t get hold any explicit description of worker linking up , mandible to abdomen , to pull together .
What Wild did find , however , was another video of a standardized behaviour on Youtube , uploaded by a Kampuchean beekeeper . Just because the scientific world is n’t aware of the phenomenon does n’t mean that the internet is n’t .
Iain Couzin , an expert in animal corporate behavior , was also stunned :
Never pick up anything like it . We must analyse this ! Any idea what ant ? “ @lovetheants:@Myrmecos@smadriant@icouzinhttp://t.co / oNNExmveDT ”
— Iain Couzin ( @icouzin)August 28 , 2014
Finally , researcher Christian Peeters reassert that he had seen the daisy - concatenation behavior in Cambodia as well . He just has n’t had enough observations in social club to compose about it in a scientific paper . In an electronic mail to Wild , he explained :
The behaviour was very stereotypic : mandibles catch antedate ant ’s gaster ( between first and second segment ) …
… The millepede were 130 mm long , identified as order Spirostreptida ( Diplopoda ) . Ant is 16 mm long .
Back then I retrospect the literature and chance no other phonograph recording of chain conduct in Ponerinae . No disc of millepede predation in Leptogenys . Specialized hunt on millipedes is limit to Thaumatomyrmex , Probolomyrmex and Gnamptogenys , but these are solitary hunters on a very different kind of millipedes ( polyxenids ) .
I set out writing a chiliad on this behavior ( formation of chains in ants through a ego - assembling behaviour ) but sadly I have not been able-bodied to get further observations . It seems to encounter at sealed times of the twelvemonth only .
By an amazing happenstance , two days ago I fetch up fieldwork in northern Thailand and came across the same Leptogenys species . There were cleaned out ring segments of big milliped outside entrances . Unfortunately I did not observe any foray .
The entire episode reveals one of the myriad ways in which the cyberspace hasfundamentally shift scientific researchin animal behaviour and behavioural ecology . Indeed , in many ways the internet has changed the style science is conducted across many fields . fortify with nothing but an internet connexion , anybody can upload a television to the internet . It can then pass across the background of researchers who are fit with the cognition that they ’re front at something peculiar , and who have the resources – if they want – to pursue the interrogative further .
https://gizmodo.com/citizen-science-helped-us-understand-more-about-the-ado-1626738251
But it also reveals the tremendous gulf between formal scientific knowledge and the collect cognition distributed across thousands of private scientists . When Wild turned to the distinctive sources of scientific information , he found nothing . But it turned out that while other research worker had document the conduct , that cognition had not yet made it into the formal book . How many “ new mintage ” are in fact well known to single researchers ? How many “ novel behaviors ” are , in accuracy , old hat to those who spend time around the animals in question ?
Meanwhile , the internet ( like any other shaft ) is not free of problems either . With any viral video , as Wild points out , multiple copy find their elbow room onto Modern platforms , often without any attribution . When that go on , it is sometimes difficult to track down the original lensman or videographer , get to any form of serious scientific data collection closely impossible . steal contentedness does n’t just rob content creators of their work ; it can also soak the scientific community of valuable entropy .
While it ’s good to have some filters in place – not just any old fleck of information justify inclusion in a scientific journal – perhaps some enterprising researcher will come up with a strategy for organizing all those scraps of “ maybe interesting ” and “ potentially novel ” observation . perhaps even something leveraging the power of the cyberspace .
[ MyrmecosviaNerdist ]
AnimalsEcologyInsectsInternetScience
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