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Comment by Karlozkiller | Hacker News Reader

Ant intelligence is often attributed to simple rule following behaviour and the ability to make the next ant adapt to what you have already done, for example they optimize the path to some food-source by leaving scent trails that will fade if no ants travel the road.

They've also been known to measure the size of enclosed areas by simply following the outer boundary until they find the initial starting point/entrance again and somehow using the time or effort it took, to be a measure of the size of the place.

It seems to be different species of ants having different behaviours, so maybe they're just stupid rule followers as one might first think. Now if we could make one species of ants learn from and adapt behaviour from another species, then there's no doubt they possess intelligence. And if they're not intelligent, should we attribute the ingeniousness these tiny buggers display to evolution instead?

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You can test this by rearing a generation of ants with no contact with the previous generation and see if they exhibit the same behavior.

My bet would be on that it's all innate. I haven't seen examples of intergenerational knowledge transmission in anything other than primates. (Maybe because primate offspring spend much a long time growing up to be adults which gives them time to learn)

Cockatoos have been seen to learn tool use from another cockatoo, though I think you could probably attempt to argue otherwise.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28990335

As someone who have seen a lot of wildlife documentaries, I have to disagree. I've seen of lot of cases of parents showing how to find food, how to hunt or find shelter, etc. Most animals are able to learn at least in their youth.

yes but ants are insects, not mammals. Insects have crazy amounts of children and their birthing patterns don't probably don't translate well to learning by example as the parent doesn't have time to teach all the children. I think the innateness is a more likely cause.

I said this because in the parent comment, he said "anything other than primates". I agree it is different for insects and as far as we know they do not seem to learn from others.

Actually the founder of the field sociobiology (or at least the main popularizer) is EO Wilson. He studies ants, and since he effectively founded the field, many scientists who study mammals actually studied under him since there wasn't an established place for sociobiology then.

Of course intelligence and sociology/social behavior are different; however, they virtually always have overlaps if any complex intelligence is to occur. It's because you need intergenerational culture to exist in order to build up such knowledge.

EO Wilson and others have proven such intergenerational knowledge transfer exists in ants.

Intelligence doesn't need to occur at an individual level. The hive can be intelligent through emergent properties and can also maintain state that acts like memory for learned experiences.

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/nov/12-wilson-says-ants-liv... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson http://www.pbs.org/program/eo-wilson/

Fascinating. Is there a book that you recommend to read more about this?

Kittens are taught how to hunt for food by their mother. A lot of that behavior is instinctual, but a good chunk of it is learned. A cat who hasn't been taught to hunt will not be as good at it, and may not realize that the result is edible.

Crows will learn basic techniques from each other, like the crows in Japan that drop nuts on crosswalks so car tires will crush the shells, which seems to have started in a single area in Tokyo and spread out from there.

I've watched crows drop walnuts above a road and immediately dive to pick up the cracked shells before the waiting magpies can swoop in. Both appear to be learned strategies.

I've observed my dog adopting a behavior learned just from watching another dog for a few minutes: sticking her whole head under water, sometimes for as long as 20 or thirty seconds and pulling up a rock from a creek.

She watched another dog doing this for a few minutes then decided she wanted to as well. Before this, she dipped at most her muzzle into the creek.

And sure, that's just one example but your claim was too restrictive.

I'm glad I said a wrong thing on hackernews because I'm learning so many new things :)

"The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer." — Cunningham's Law

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law

Some species appear to also count steps. A researcher glued stilts to ants legs after leaving the anthill and they would go past it in their return and get lost (or so I remember reading in "the math book").

Could it also be possible that the stilt-wearing ant was too far off the ground to smell its colony, or maybe it deemed itself defective and quarantined itself?

It also seems possible that the stilts would frustrate effort measurement.

They also shortened legs, with the reverse effect. Desert ants cannot use scent because scents evaporate too fast in deserts (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/06/060629-ants-..., http://inspiringscience.net/2012/11/09/do-ants-really-count-...)

Possibly. I didn't read the linked paper, just the little article about it in this pop-sci book.

Regardless, the point is that humans are not the only beings who measure quantitatively.

Reminds me of a silly story: http://jokes.cc.com/funny-doctor/fj9nmq/the-scientist-and-th...

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