Swiss researchers conduct study to find how ants work by adding barcodes

At first instinct ants seem annoying but when you ponder on these small creatures you start to imagine how special these small living beings are. Ants show some remarkable skills that even baffles the so-intelligent human beings. Ants are amazing in so many ways as they can lift weight much more than their own, they show extremely high level of discipline and they live in large colonies where millions of them live and work together.

The colonies built by ants are wonderful and so complex that it becomes hard to imagine they are made by such small insects. Even with the vast knowledge we have acquired in the scientific age there still isn’t much we know about the complexity of the ant colonies.

Now to understand this phenomena Swiss scientists have added barcodes to hundreds of hands using glue so they can monitor their movement and understand how they work. These hundreds or thousands of barcoded ants are moving freely in six lab based colonies and scientists are recording their movements from over a month. In their study they found 9 million ant-to-ant interactions. Scientists found out that ants usually divide themselves in three focused teams or groups. The job of one group is to tend the young, the other one keeps the nest clean while the third one finds food for everyone. We have known this fact from previous studies but the Swiss scientists wanted to know how ants divide themselves and how they know which group they belong to.

What they found is each colony has a queen which gives birth to ants but it was established that its her only job and she does not commands ants belonging to her colony. So she does not dictates who gets into which team. According to the researchers the age of the ants play a role in division of labor and what kind of work they do.  To test this hypothesis scientists marked which ants were born when and gave different color to ants according to the weeks they were born in to classify them.

They found out that the younger ants are more likely to work in order to look after the younger new born ants while the older ones were responsible for the food. While the ones in the middle age of ‘young’ and ‘older’ usually worked to keep the nest clean.

The communication was another factor scientists wanted to learn about in this study. They wanted to know how ants tell others when they found any threat or food at some place. In their research they found that if one ant has an important news it tells it to others who further transfer the information in an ant-to-ant interaction in the whole community. It takes about an hour for the news to reach the whole community.

The information found in this study is impressive and tells us more about how these really interesting creatures work and how intelligently they handle everything to survive.