No ant directs the behavior of any other ant.

and when they came to the Valley of the Ants, an ant said 'Ants, go into your dwellings lest Solomon and his army should, unknowingly, crush you'

and when they came to the Valley of the Ants, an ant said 'Ants, go into your dwellings lest Solomon and his army should, unknowingly, crush you'

When they arrived in the valley of the ants, one ant said to the others, Enter your dwellings lest you be carelessly crushed by Soloman and his army.

When they arrived in the valley of the ants, one ant said to the others, Enter your dwellings lest you be carelessly crushed by Soloman and his army.

The first is that the experience of the ant of each ant can't be very predictable.

The ant isn't alone.

Let's look at that ant.

What's in it for the ant?

And why was the ant doing it?

So, things happen to an ant colony.

Here from underneath is an ant foot, and when the claws don't dig in, that pad automatically comes out without the ant doing anything.

There's an ant crawling up a vertical surface.

So there's nothing in it for the ant.

But we know that occasionally ants go astray, and what happens is that, if army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule just do what the ant in front of you does.

One of the reasons I tell you about ants is because of my husband, who is in fact an ant taxonomist and when we got married, he promised to name an ant after me, which he did Procryptocerus nalini, a canopy ant.

So, an ant starts out somewhere near the queen.

What is this ant doing? What is this in aid of?

And I thought, These ants, are they looking for the queen ant?

But I thought, perhaps the ant won't know, it'll probably move in.

And the answer is nothing. There's nothing in it for the ant.

And all ant colonies have in common that there's no central control.

Each ant, then, as it comes back in, is contacting other ants.

This is an ant that stores its colleagues' honey in its abdomen.

If an ant fell into my rice, I couldn't see that either.

(Prophet Sulaiman heard the voice of the she ant from far away.)

(Prophet Sulaiman heard the voice of the she ant from far away.)

Go to the ant, you sluggard. Consider her ways, and be wise

Go to the ant, you sluggard. Consider her ways, and be wise

Go to the ant, thou sluggard consider her ways, and be wise

Go to the ant, thou sluggard consider her ways, and be wise

When we talk about bottom up, decentralized phenomena, the ant colony is the classic metaphor, because, no individual ant knows what it's doing, but collectively ants are able to reach incredibly intelligent decisions.

Ants are not known to occur in Redwood trees, curiously enough, and we wondered whether this ant, this species of ant, was only endemic to that one tree, or possibly to that grove.

This is an eight legged scorpion, six legged ant, forty four legged centipede.

And we can mark them individually so we know which ant is which.

For the army my father joined the army as a brigadier the Biafran army.

The simplest idea is that when an ant is in a small colony and an ant in a large colony can use the same rule, like I expect to meet another forager every three seconds.

What goals is this ant trying to achieve by climbing this blade of grass?

The same ant doesn't do the same task over and over its whole life.

And the amazing thing about this is that an ant lives only a year.

And I was working in the context of a view of ant colonies in which each ant was somehow dedicated to its task from birth and sort of performed independently of the others, knowing its place on the assembly line.

Army

This is what it looks like close up here's the ant foot, and there's the glue.

When one ant touches another, it's smelling it, and it can tell, for example, whether the other ant is a nest mate because ants cover themselves and each other, through grooming, with a layer of grease, which carries a colony specific odor.

So we may be the only family that has an ant named after each one of us.