Published 2 months ago • loading... • Updated 1 month ago

Ants Exhibit Memory-Based Aggression Towards Rivals

New research from evolutionary biologists at Germany's University of Freiburg shows that ants retain knowledge of hostile encounters with neighboring enemies and act accordingly.
The study published in Current Biology indicates that ants behave more aggressively towards those that smell of past negative encounters and more calmly towards passive ants.
Research associate Volker Nehring stated that the study provides evidence that ants learn from their experiences and can hold a grudge.
The scientists conducted experiments in two phases to determine how ants remember bad experiences, leading to variations in aggression based on past encounters.

Insights by Ground AI

Does this summary seem wrong?

11 Articles

All

Left

Center

Right

IFLScience

Don't Cross Ants – They Remember Their Enemies And Hold Grudges

Antman doesn’t seem like such an unscary superhero now, huh?

Evolutionary biology: Ants can hold a grudge

Evolutionary biologists are investigating the extent to which ants learn from past experiences. After being attacked by ants from a particular nest, ants behave more aggressively towards others from that same nest.

2 months ago·United States

Read Full Article

Zeit Online

Biology: Ants are vindictive

Much is predetermined in the life of an insect colony. This is why a study is surprising: Ants remember who they had trouble with. In other words, they learn from experience.

2 months ago·Germany

Read Full Article

Popular Science

Even ants may hold grudges

It’s not just humans who have trouble making amends—Earth’s 20 quadrillion ants aren’t quick to forgive, either. Ants primarily rely on their fine-tuned olfactory sense to differentiate between the smell of members of their own family (i.e. safe ants) and ants from other colonies. A familiar scent while out foraging, for example, allows a worker ant to know which nearby ants are there to help, and which may be rivals hunting for the same resourc…

2 months ago·United States

Ants hold grudges, study suggests

A team of evolutionary biologists has demonstrated that ants learn from experience. Led by Dr. Volker Nehring, research associate in the Evolutionary Biology and Animal Ecology group at the University of Freiburg, and doctoral student Mélanie Bey, the team repeatedly confronted ants with competitors from another nest. The test ants remembered the negative experiences they had during these encounters.

2 months ago·United Kingdom

Read Full Article

El Pais

The collective intelligence of ants surpasses that of humans

There are only two types of animals capable of transporting an object so large that they can only succeed in cooperating and going to one: humans and ants. And not all 15,000 species of formicides know how to do something like this. Only 1% are able to work as a team to get a piece of T-shaped through two narrow doors very close together. The experiment is typical of computer science and artificial intelligence, but a group of entomologists have…

2 months ago·Spain

Read Full Article

Think freely.Subscribe and get full access to Ground NewsSubscriptions start at $9.99/year