
Are ants capable of self recognition? (2015) [pdf] - sjeohp
http://www.journalofscience.net/File_Folder/521-532(jos).pdf
======
hprotagonist
I am reminded of Feynman's musings on rat mazes. Are they quite sure they're
measuring what they believe they're measuring?

> For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds
> of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young
> did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one
> side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food
> was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door
> down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the
> door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so
beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before?
Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other
doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the
faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he
thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change
the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats
might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the
laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and, still
the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they
ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he
covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool
the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any
of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A‑Number‑l experiment. That is
the experiment that makes rat‑running experiments sensible, because it
uncovers the clues that the rat is really using—not what you think it’s using.
And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use
in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with
rat‑running.

~~~
sjeohp
Methodology is important but given that (assuming the results are valid):

\- Ants ignore other ants behind clear glass but inspect their own
reflections.

\- An ant with a blue dot on its head when shown its reflection will rub at
the dot.

\- An ant with a brown/invisible dot on its head will ignore it.

\- An ant with a blue dot on the _back_ of its head where it can't be seen in
the mirror will ignore it.

At a certain point Occam's razor comes into play, doesn't it?

~~~
hprotagonist
As moyix points out below, Occam's razor could well also point to "the
investigators are deluding themselves".

~~~
sjeohp
Not really since that's not an explanation of the results. The simplest
explanation of the results is that ants have some degree of self-awareness.

------
moyix
Peter Watts (author of Blindsight) had a great post about this study:
[http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6822](http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6822)

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macawfish
My girlfriend is gonna flip out when I send her this... she _loves_ ants.

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cronjobber
It seems doable, e.g. have a few neurons observe that the "other" ant's
movements seem to obey our own motor neuron's commands.

The consequence wouldn't be that ants are conscious, it would be to question
why "self recognition" was made out to be such a big deal.

~~~
sjeohp
Self recognition is considered a big deal because very few animals that we
know of are capable of it: most apes, some monkeys, dolphins, elephants,
magpies, etc. Notice they also happen to be among the most sapient animals.

In this case self-recognition == self-awareness. The ants had a stored
representation of themselves in memory that didn't include a blue dot on the
head. When met with their reflection they were able to deduce that:

a) they were looking at themselves

b) the blue dot was not a part of them and so should be removable

Whether it's possible to be unconsciously self-aware is an interesting
question.

------
ajuc
One comment on
[http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6822](http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6822)
had interesting point - ants have a fungal infection that grows on their heads
and forces them to climb and die.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis)

Maybe that's why they have the hardware to recognize themselves in reflections
(water droplets are pretty reflective on their scale, right?) and to groom if
anything is on their heads?

~~~
sjeohp
By the time cordyceps fruits the ant has already climbed and died. There would
be nothing to see before then.

~~~
pavement
That does not preclude an evolutionary pathway from indirectly forming around
incidental hazards.

Consider a disease that kills everything incapable of resisting it. The
survivors are incidentally immune to the disease, regardless of the reason
they possess the trait, and only because everything else was destroyed, and so
now their descendents fill the vacuum the disease created.

It also means that the subsequent generations get to carry forward any odd
traits that their ancestors displayed, whether they make sense or not, simply
because there's room for baggage to slip through. So, it would not be
unreasonable to consider that the intelligence is incidental to a hypothetic
disease immunity, rather than an essential survival characteristic. The
reproducing survivors just happened to carry both traits, but only needed one.

I don't think it fits this parasitic ant fungus scenario, because the fungus
is not an invasive extinction level pandemic species of fungus, rampaging so
violently throughout ant populations that it creates a bottleneck that
eclipses substantial portions of ant species. The fungus is limited to small
regions, compare to the full range of ant activity, worldwide.

But, it's not unreasonable to consider ideas that don't intuitively correlate
to the observed result, at least in terms of biological evolution.

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pygy_
That's an interesting result, but actually, most animals are capable of self-
recognition, not visual, but olfactive.

It is something that we dismiss because we humans are handicapped, nose-wise.

~~~
sjeohp
That is interesting. How do they test that?

~~~
miceeatnicerice
Isn't it implied in being territorial?

~~~
sjeohp
I would draw a distinction between that kind of olfactory/territorial self-
recognition and the kind suggested by this test which actually implies some
kind of mental representation of the self.

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mrstone
Since Beall's list is nowhere to be found, is this even a reputable journal? I
can't find any information and the website looks very amateurish.

~~~
sjeohp
I agree about the journal but these are the authors:
[https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?start=0&q=%22Marie-
Claire+...](https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?start=0&q=%22Marie-
Claire+Cammaerts%22+OR+%22Roger+Cammaerts%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5)

------
visarga
Ants have 250,000 neurons. They have some capacity.

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ionflux
great... I must have killed like a thousand of them the past 2 weeks, they're
coming in my apartment through the floor...

~~~
lutusp
Remember about ants that they're not individuals as we understand the term.
They're more like a hive mind. Like the Borg. It's the same with bees.

~~~
ionflux
is there a suggestion hidden underneath that sentence?

~~~
lutusp
No, only a reply to the OP's assumption that those facing the mirror test were
individuals.

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lutusp
First, until this study has been replicated by a different laboratory, one
completely removed from the original lab, I invoke Betteridge's Law[1]: "Any
headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word _no_."

Second, dogs are notorious for failing the mirror test, along with many monkey
species, and these species have plenty more brain calls than ants (although
brain size may bear only a superficial relationship to the outcome of this
test). Extraordinary results require extraordinary evidence.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

~~~
sjeohp
> these species have plenty more brain calls than ants

Much less complex societies though, for what it's worth.

~~~
Baeocystin
I wouldn't say that. Much less _regimented_ social behavior, perhaps. But ants
have a lot of behaviors that clearly demonstrate their algorithmic nature.

[http://io9.gizmodo.com/5895435/how-to-create-an-ant-
spiral-o...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/5895435/how-to-create-an-ant-spiral-of-
death)

For one of the more dramatic examples.

