
How Insulin Helped Create Ant Societies - digital55
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-insulin-helped-create-ant-societies-20180814/
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vinceguidry
A Quora answer pointed out something to me, I'd pull it up but Quora makes it
really hard to search through your previous upvotes, something that people
regularly miss about ants.

The worker's stomachs is separated from their mouths by a very, very small
opening. Meaning they can't eat solid food. Instead they chew it and
regurgitate it so the larvaes, who don't have such a constricting path to
their stomachs, can finish digesting it. Worker ants eat the liquid waste of
the larvae.

So there's a body-morphological explanation for eusociality.

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Nasrudith
Hmm interesting, I always thought queens were the result of a "mutant"
highjacking the means of reproduction to "spay" the other insects leading to
survival cooperation of others and the arrangement being so advantageous that
the original largely died out along with any "resistant" strains which were
either unaffected or reacted by trying to kill the queen.

Insects are apparently easy to puppet relatively speaking given cordyceps.

I suppose insulin works as a reproductive feedback loop if it rises from
sufficient food reproduce to offload excessive nutrients. If lower care for
existing genetic investments and go gather more food, lacking the first part
would be a r-strategy probably doomed to fail.

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kuwze
Edit: apparently this is b.s.

On an unrelated note, I recently found out that ants pass the mirror test[0].
Is that weird or what?

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Insects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Insects)

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notafraudster
This may well be true -- I clicked with enthusiasm because this would interest
me a lot -- but if you follow the link you'll see that the married authors of
the "study" have a history of making nonsense claims (she has two separate
nonsense Wifi studies, which you'll see a bunch if you Google). The study
itself was published in a pay-to-publish journal with no peer review.

I read the paper. The design, as listed in the paper, seems fine. The main
rival hypothesis for me would be that the ants do see the mirror, don't think
it's themselves or pass the mirror test, and scratch because they're bothered
by the marking on their face which they can feel. But the authors do claim to
test this and find that ants not exposed to mirrors don't scratch their faces.
So to be clear the threat I'm proposing to the study's validity is fraud on
the part of the authors, not a failed execution.

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kuwze
Ugh I knew I should have done more research into it. Thanks for finding that
out.

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notafraudster
No problem. I hope someone replicates the substantive result in a less tainted
way!

