Amazing. Also neat that we may actually learn to treat human infections better after this discovery.
"Erik Frank. Laurent Keller also adds that these findings 'have medical implications because the primary pathogen in ant’s wounds, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, is also a leading cause of infection in humans, with several strains being resistant to antibiotics'."
Love imagining leading scientists from big pharma rushing to investigate the compound cocktails ants are using to make the next blockbuster drug.
This is a pedantic note, but in general Pharma does not care about antibiotics drug development - It’s an economic desert. If it was a cancer or serious rare disease drug, they’d be grinding up buckets of ants yesterday.
Well rare disease is also an economic desert.
Its only because of Government regulation big pharma started to care about these.
Mainly the Orphan Drug Act of 1983 with provided tax incentives as well as subsidized research. There is also the Rare Disease act of 2002 but that IMO is less signifigant.
Don't forget that for rare diseases affecting children the government awards fast track vouchers. These allow you to shorten the approval time of another drug (or sell it for a few hundred million for another company to do the same.
I totally agree. Although I'm not sure similar vouchers for antibiotics would be sufficient for the same success, as there are also logistical, financial and scientific advantages that have enabled rare disease drug development. Many rare disease being targeted are monogenic, providing a very 'clean' scientific mechanism, and higher success rates. The clinical studies can be small well defined population as pre/neonatal genetic testing is now routine, and supportive Foundations are often instrumental. Financially, insurers/payers have been amenable to huge per-patient prices in rare diseases because of low volume and often impressive efficacy.
Developing antibiotics has lower technical success rates. The medical need is more acute and distributed across more broad populations with much of them poor making patients 'harder to find'. Any novel antibiotic are typicaly held in reserve until after generation of resistance to all the current drugs, limiting volume. Commonly, physician and patient over-/mis-usage of antibiotics generates resistance, generating a limited 'valuable' life span of the drug.
There are many governmental/regulatory incentives being developed, and at least one industry-backed fund (AMR action fund) supporting early research but it’s still a challenge to build business plans for this.
Have you seen what else ants can do? They are full of insanely impressive/scary/smart behaviors.
Ants farm aphids. They don't just find aphids and collect their "honeydew" excretions. They actually bring the aphids to the plants and then tend to them.
Ants harvest the sunflower seeds from my sunflowers. Not just some of the seeds. If I leave the flowers even one day past the time to harvest those seeds, the ants get every single seed. They do it by having some ants up on the flower popping out the seeds, and more ants down below collecting them off the ground. That's some incredible coordination. And these are tiny ants, not some big powerful ants. It's mind boggling to think any creature is able to pull it off. I'm honestly surprised they don't have megalithic structures built of huge stones. Though their underground colonies are megalithic in scale compared to the ants.
Maybe instead of ancient aliens we should look into ants as the actual builders of the pyramids.
While I'd be surprised to learn they have anything a normal person would call a sense of self, it would only be mild surprise and even then mainly because it means we finally have a testable definition. (Amongst other things, I don't buy that the mirror test is a good test, but rather I think it's an OK first attempt at a test).
We're really bad at this.
> In a way, doesn't it already "talk to itself" when generating sentences, e.g., its output token gets added to the input tokens successively?
I'm not sure if that counts as talking to itself or not; I think that I tend to form complete ideas first and then turn them into words which I may edit afterwards, but is that editing process "talking to myself"?
And this might well be one kind of "sense of self". Possibly.
> In a way, doesn't it already "talk to itself" when generating sentences, e.g., its output token gets added to the input tokens successively?
If this is the basis of a mirror test, most AI recognition attempts have pretty high failure rates, so I'd say they currently fail. But if we presented a similar test to a human, "did you write this?" it seems to fall short of a mirror test because it can be falsified by an otherwise unintelligent algorithm which remembers its previous output.
Wait, I think that might recursively turn into the singularity. So we can do it now, but around GPT-6.5 or LLaMa 5, unless this transformer-based explosion maxes out our silicon circuit tech by then, be careful.
Mild suggestion: experiment first. LLMs have been observed to emit nonsense such as getting stuck indefinitely emitting the same token, etc. Do you really want dibs on that?
We can have ChatGPT talk to itself by simply opening two chats and pasting back and forth. But the LLM can't win: if it notices then it will be called "wrong" because it is talking to another instance of itself. If it does not notice then it is "wrong" because it failed to notice.
With perfect duplication it's hard to tell; I imagine that if we had a magic/sci-fi duplication device that worked on people, and a setup that resolved the chirality problem, the subjects would have similar difficulties.
Indeed it would! Is anyone here going to try to do that?
As an observer is needed to assess the LLM, perhaps the easiest test is copy-paste between two instances and then ask chatGPT, or whichever LLM, "who were you talking to?".
You can’t use two instances. They both would have individual selfs.
I think an experiment would be to feed back whatever a LLM says to that same LLM, and see whether they’ll, at some time, say “why are you doing that to me?”
I tried with a few variations, GPT 3.5 and 4 seem to be pretty aligned in not expressing themselves when not asked a question. "Our conversation seems to be in a loop, if you have anything I can help you with ..." blah
The mirror test would be less interesting if we could program/teach animals to pass or fail it. So I wouldn’t be impressed if a LLM is able to pass these types of tests.
I would guess(without much evidence) that you don't need much cognition in each individual ant. You can get very complex behaviours out of very simple rules in idealised systems like cellular automata.
My bias (for essentially aesthetic reasons) is to assume that each ant is basically pretty dumb, and the cool complex behaviors happen as an emergent property of how they respond to the stimuli they recieve (especially all the pheromone messages they get from other ants).
>each ant is basically pretty dumb, and the cool complex behaviors happen as an emergent property of how they respond to the stimuli they recieve (especially all the pheromone messages they get from other ants).
There was an episode of Cosmos[0], where Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about bees, and shows how they are actually a hive intelligence that could be compared to us.
Ants don't have overlords. From the standpoint of genetics, one ant colony is a single organism. The queen mates only once in her life, before starting a colony. All the subsequent individual ants are from the genetic material of that foundational mating.
When ants from different colonies meet (with different genetics lineages) they fight wars of total annihilation. Ant colonies do not cooperate.
This is a bit simplistic, especially the last paragraph. There are quite a lot of examples of ants which aren't particularly related to each other cooperating [1].
Probably the most common example is that colonies which have been around for a while and are stable often adopt new queens that turn up from outside. Then multiple queens are producing workers and you get a colony made of many distinct "families".
There are even examples of nests consisting of ants from different species. Quoting from the article I referenced earlier
> Ants engaged in parabiotic associations cooperate in a variety of ways including shared nest defense, trophallaxis, and communal use of trail pheromones. For example, “ant gardens” in the Neotropics (Davidson, 1988; Orivel et al., 1997) and in Asian rainforests (Kaufmann and Maschwitz, 2006; Menzel and Bluthgen, 2010) are often co-inhabited by species from the genera Crematogaster and Camponotus (along with a number of other genera) .... While brood chambers are kept separate, the rest of the colonies mix freely within the joint nest. In addition to sharing foraging trails to plant-based resources (Menzel et al., 2010), both species will defend the nest although larger Camponotus tend to exhibit the majority of the defensive behaviors (Menzel and Bluthgen, 2010).
Ants don't rebel against the ways of their society, each ant knows their place and doesn't have aspirations to be something else, other than what it was predestined to be at birth.
I guess there are a couple of movies about that. :)
tiny animals like ants cannot know order and balance . They are like tiny robots.
By carrying out duties far exceeding its own power, everything testifies to the All-Powerful One’s existence
"Yes, the All-Wise Creator summarizes the principles of the Clear Book in most beautiful form and abbreviated fashion and with a particular pleasure and through a special need, and includes them in beings. If everything acts thus with a particular pleasure out of a particular need, it unknowingly conforms to the principles of the Clear Book." Quran's Light
Just to be clear you don't know that 'ants cannot know order' and are tiny robots. You are just making this up.
You have to prove a statement like that. All evidence points to them being intelligent and you are just pushing a human oriented version of the world that minimizes the intelligent animals and insects that challenge your world view.
I'm amused that people call ants doing pretty human behavioral quirks "scary". Obviously the implication is that they're smarter than we knew, but I'm giggling imagining some other species going "Have you seen what humans can do?" and then just describing the beef industry, Boston Dynamics robot dogs or Facebook.
Humans are absolutely terrifying. The most scary and dangerous of all creatures. I'm sure humans kill far more than any other animal. Perhaps only bacteria and viruses exceed the level of scary that humans have attained.
But ants are pretty damn close to human levels of scary, IMO. Look up the acid spitting crazy ants and tell me that's not a little bit scary.
According to some quick googling I just did malaria kills around 600-700 thousand people per year, while in 2016 road traffic accidents killed around 1.3 million (both numbers attributed to the World Health Organisation).
Assuming that a majority of the road traffic deaths are attributable to humans then humans seem to very easily beat mosquitos/malaria at killing other humans.
You may be correct, I'm not sure. Apparently about half of humans ever have lived in the last 2000 years, and the death rate for those in the earlier half (before 2000 years ago) was overwhelming dominated by very high child mortality. I guess the answer probably depends on what proportion of those infant deaths were due to malaria.
Humans have already killed 600 million animals for meat this year and the year is only 4 days old. Humans aren't the only relevant creature on this planet.
That is an awesome idea. I will try to remember that this summer. I always grow a lot of sunflowers each year so there are plenty of opportunities to shoot something like that.
Do link me to the video if you do. I've always loved watching ants do their thing.
I used to feed ants to watch them, and even witnessed some and ant wars in my garden as a child. I would have spent days watching them harvest sunflower seeds!
I'm especially surprised a tiny milligram worth of brain is able to provide such high level functions and coordination. I'd normally expect all those neurons would be occupied fully with processing visual stimuli, smells and coordination limb movement alone.
I guess just hard to tell how much of that is attributable to cognition inside the brain of each ant, and how much is network effects with each ant responding in individually stupid ways to the pheromone (and other) signals they create.
Each ant could be very dumb while the system of ants as a whole are quite "smart" (I.e. exhibit complex and interesting behaviours).
But adaptions also happen by evolution and (very speculatively) might also happen at the colony level by it changing its responses somehow. E.g. I could imagine an ant colony suddenly faced with many attackers adapting by breeding more soldiers.
Ants have been doing the whole "advanced civilization" before long before humans even evolved. There's a ton of stuff we still have to learn about, and from, them.
edit - didn't see eigenket's comment basically saying the same thing
I've seen and heard a lot of what they can do, but certainly not everything. Pretty sure humanity as a whole is very far from understanding everything ants do and why.
they also have a really organized division of labor, like "some wait at the nest for some days, then after the ones who went out get tired, the resting ones assume their positions etc."
Assuming only the humans have certain traits or level of intelligence/knowledge in some areas of life becomes a more foolish act as we discover what other living things are capable of.
> That's insanely impressive and almost scary level of adaptation
I fully agree while thinking the same thing about our immune system behavior. The insanely scary impressive thing is that this level of adaptation is the rule not the anomaly in biological systems.
>For treatment, they then apply antimicrobial compounds and proteins to the infected wounds. They take these antibiotics from the metapleural gland, which is located on the side of their thorax. Its secretion contains 112 components, half of which have an antimicrobial or wound-healing effect
> If the wounds become infected, there is a significant survival risk. However, Matabele ants have developed a sophisticated healthcare system: they can distinguish between non-infected and infected wounds and treat the latter efficiently with antibiotics they produce themselves.
I watched a video once on YouTube about ants and there was a section where they encountered termites and had an all out battle.
The termite warriors would literally bite off the ant's limbs in 1 quick bite.
They mentioned the antibiotics allowed ants to resume basic functionality within a day. Imagine losing your arm at 9am and then still be useful by 3pm with no more than a few seconds or a minute of someone giving you antibiotics. We're not talking about regeneration here, but walking around and acting as normal as you can be given your missing limb(s).
Unfortunately no. It was probably about a year ago and searching around for "ants" videos isn't coming up with anything. I've noticed that after a while YouTube will remove the red border to indicate you've watched a video.
The video I'm thinking about had pretty big black "warrior" ants scout out an area and engage with termites, I'm not sure of their species. Based on my memory it felt like a documentary style video. It was all live captured video with a narrator, not an animation.
To be honest I'm not super into ants. It was one of those videos that somehow landed in my feed and I was pleasantly surprised because I like learning about new things.
The top one ("Megaponera analis - termite predators of the african savannah") was decent although the accent was hard for me to understand. It's definitely not the video the GP referenced, though, because the narrator doesn't mention the wound treatment or antibiotics, just that the injured ants are carried home.
Check "Life on our planet" on Netflix. It's about dinosaurs but also has plenty of bits around evolution. In one episode they talk about ants vs termites and also focus on that particular bit (limbs getting damaged or ripped off)
Haha, you know what. This must be where I saw it because I went ~6 months back in my YouTube history and CTRL+F'd for ants and saw nothing except a documentary about fire ants which didn't cover this topic.
What a horrible assumption I made thinking I saw this about a year ago, I got tricked into thinking it must have been a long time ago since my YouTube history was coming up empty. I did watch life on our planet shortly after it was available. This is one of the pitfalls of watching lots of media on different platforms, it all blends together. I watch a lot of documentaries on both platforms.
I have that problem too. Not only with video but information consumption in general.
Things I believed I read 18 months ago happened only 4-5 months back max.
Crazy what overconsumption of information does to us
T-cell is a type of cell. they can move and work. antibodies are small proteins generated by cell. usually, antibodies binding to something and help immune system work. antibiotics are some molecules we can add it into our body and only kill pathogens.
so they are different terms. in another way, if the molecules will be used as drug, it probably call antibiotic.
>They take these antibiotics from the metapleural gland
The fact that a gland could arise through natural selection makes over 112 different components from anti-biotics to chemicals blows my mind.
The underlying theory that "random mutation" and errors in the copying of ant DNA created a secretion sac is crazy to me. I imagine this first ant was like the "Mule" in foundation, where he could introduce chemicals to "Control and conquer". There seems to be some underlying learning mechanism built within "Random mutation".
Heck yeah, evolution is mind-blowing sometimes. Ok, most of the time. However, as a layperson, I often find that things aren't so random and almost unbelievable as they seem at first glance when you start having more context and pieces to fit together.
It appears that we have long known that ants, like humans, have microbiomes that produce myriad antimicrobial and antibiotic compounds (and other bioactive molecules) which they are able to make use of. [1] In this paper it sounds like there are other glands that also store and secrete these antimicrobial compounds.
So both mechanisms -- antimicrobial compounds from the microbiome and storage/secretion in glands -- most likely existed prior to the development of this specialized metapleural gland. This specific gland is used very frequently in grooming behavior. When they groom themselves, each other, the queen and larva (and even their fungal colonies in the case of leafcutters), they may massage their metaleural gland prior to this grooming to apply antimicrobials/antibiotics and reduce risk of infection. Presumably grooming behavior existed prior to this gland as well, and almost certainly involved secretions from other glands (saliva or the ant equivalent comes to mind), especially to 'clean off' old pheromones as well as crud that would interrupt signaling.
So we have pretty much all the ingredients independently for this rather specialized organ + behavior (*this is a narrative constructed via layperson reading and speculation, not in any way intended to be presented as scientific fact).
Also, I'm no biologist (let alone evolution/genetics specialist), but what I understand and what makes the most sense to me is that evolution is no longer strictly believed to occur solely on the basis of random mutations. For instance, we have a lot of evidence in very specific cases that epigenetic changes can occur in response to the environment as well as internal processes, and that these changes can be inherited and become a permanent part of the genome by various proposed mechanisms:
>There is now good evidence that epigenetic inheritance is ubiquitous and is involved in adaptive evolution and macroevolution. I argue that the many evolutionary consequences of epigenetic inheritance open up new research areas and require the extension of the evolutionary synthesis beyond the current neo-Darwinian model.
The abstract of another paper goes into more detail on how epigenetics may directly and indirectly influence evolution, if you are interested. It's mostly over my head beyond the broad strokes. [3]
I am in a constant battle with ants in my kitchen, they are tenacious little buggers and the only way that really works is to keep the kitchen immaculately clean!
I live in an area where Monomorium pharaonis is an invasive species, and there are many fruit trees in our city (mostly varieties of cherry and plum).
Leave this Mixture in a shallow lid/dish next to the Ant entry point:
1 part borax dish soap
3 parts granulated sugar
15 parts warm water
They will ingest the mixture, and return the payload to the colony if dilute enough. A few days later the slow poison should start to knock out the group.
Indeed, once a path is chemically marked it is very hard to keep ants out, and failure to remove a waste bin lures them in again.
Mixing kiln dried diatomaceous earth with water for treating the surrounding external structure also helps knock down anything with a chitin exoskeleton. It can be effective if a colony has attached to a tunnel system.
Three other options (admittedly less effective, but the upside is no killing).
1. Give them what they want. I have a bottle of cheap corn syrup I use as a truce offering. If I start getting scouts or the beginnings of an incursion I just dump a big glob of the syrup right next to their nest outside. Everyone disappears from my house within a half hour. Usually, they forget about the kitchen for a couple weeks. Then I repeat.
2. Peppermint oil. The ants here will avoid it. If I smear it across an active ant line it interrupts it even.
3. Ant moat. Works great for sugar products and pet dishes. I use 4 shot glasses full of soapy water holding up a small kitchen rack. The rack is perched on 4 small submerged pillars I added to the rack's feet.
Edit: of course an invasive species needs to be dealt with in accordance to the threat to the local ecosystem. I'm just providing options for simple nuisance ants.
Not a great idea, as people can skew the ecosystem into causing more harm. More ants can increase Aphid populations that spread viral plant diseases (see Huanglongbing or citrus greening disease).
"2. Peppermint oil."
Never tried this one, but seems expensive. Also, most mint products are illegal to import in some areas, given it can carry symbiotic fungus spores that may decimate food crops.
"3. Ant moat. "
Many species have building skills, and some will even build tiny twig/gravel roads/bridges over dangerous/irritating substances.
They are fascinating little creatures, and an important part of the ecosystem. =)
I can totally see people removing concrete slabs, laminated floors, window drip drains, and exhaust vents inside walls. The ants won't understand human idealism, but most aphids and fruit flies sure love vinegar smells. =)
Never had trouble with those for using vinegar to remove ant trails. If you've got aphids and fruit flies getting in too, maybe that's the first thing to solve!
As for the rest, I certainly don't imagine it working all the time everywhere, but for the local pavement ant colony's roughly annual sortie into my kitchen it's fine. And what do you find of idealism in my not wanting to poison the room I feed myself in?
Sadly that's not always effective. My house is immaculately clean, no food residue for ants to find, but they still come......for water!
They get into toilet tank, cat's water bowl, flower vase, my cup, looking for nothing but water. Not once had I seen them moving any sort of food in my house, (they also doesn't seem to be interested in cat food), but they always manage to find water. I wonder how they manage such a low calorie diet.
It took quite a bit of effort to caulk every one of their entrance; which seems to be the most effective measure so far.
I've had excellent results with ant bait containing hydramethylnon. Just placed a couple bait containers in the room I had them; they were gone the next day and it's been almost three years.
My experience with ants (at least with common small black ants) is that they tend to eventually remove the dead body after some poking around, rather than keep away from the crime scene.
I'm sure it's unrelated but this reminds me of my dog. If I ever have a paper cut or like dry skin on my hands from eczema, as soon as he sniffs the cut or damaged skin he tries to keep licking them like he's... cleaning them out or something? He's my first dog so I haven't really looked into why dogs do that.
Of course I wash my hands with soap very well after he does that since he obviously has many germs.
>If I ever have a paper cut or like dry skin on my hands from eczema, as soon as he sniffs the cut or damaged skin he tries to keep licking them like he's... cleaning them out or something? He's my first dog so I haven't really looked into why dogs do that.
If it were an injury on the dog, it's very helpful for preventing infection.
However, because it's on you, it's a good way for you to get an infection and need your limbs amputated.
Ants do other amazing stuff too. E.g. they break seeds into two halves when storing so the seeds don't germinate. They also know that Coriander seeds germinate even when split into two so they split it into four parts.
"With the exception of humans, I know of no other living creature that can carry out such sophisticated medical wound treatments," - aren't cats/dogs doing the same by licking their wounds, applying ample amounts of lactoferrin that is a potent antibacterial/antiviral substance?
distributed cognition is a really bizarre thing that we need to learn more about
turns out problem solving and intelligence don't have to be localized at all and even not having them localized doesn't necessarily hinder the ability for it to handle complex problems either
Re: ants. A quick google suggests there could be around twenty quadrillion ants on earth. With such volume, they could literally "learn" through pure trial and error like a machine learning model.
Time to stop preaching about eating insects, and start offering them equal rights!
I, for one, will not participate in the insect holocaust, and will embrace their mesosoma in friendship.
Yeah, it's a riff on the old random factoid you used to see all the time in papers and books where someone would be talking about something like Spanish Rice and the editor would helpfully point out that in Spain they just call the dish Rice. Also, it's just fun to make puns sometimes.
A similar joke:
Batman and Robin are in hot pursuit of the Joker when they hop in the Batmobile. Unfortunately it fails to start so Batman tells Robin that he is going pull out the Batskates and continue to chase the Joker. In the meantime he tells Robin to check the battery. Robin agrees but after a moment pauses to ask "What's a 'Tery'?"
Dang does an amazing job of moderating but I am sure it's near impossible to keep up at this point. At least the overly political article submissions aren't making it through. I've been reprimanded and have learned the error of my ways in comments. Sometimes people just need the reminder. No matter what you are going through in life it's not ok to take it out on others.
I also assumed the same, so I looked back in time. If you read some of the early HN posts, the quality, length, variety is the same as is now. (length seems longer now).
There's even a bunch of "what did this site become" comments from way back too!
I think it's we who change, we mature, grow older, more grumpy or less grumpy.
"Erik Frank. Laurent Keller also adds that these findings 'have medical implications because the primary pathogen in ant’s wounds, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, is also a leading cause of infection in humans, with several strains being resistant to antibiotics'."
Love imagining leading scientists from big pharma rushing to investigate the compound cocktails ants are using to make the next blockbuster drug.