This weekend, I went through the chapter called Ants at work: maids, nannies, laborers, soldiers in the book by Jae Choe that I have mentioned in previous posts.

Here, the text explains how ants work as maids, nannies, laborers, and soldiers in the colony. (I know you guessed that.) In fact, the writer goes on to assert that the only human occupations of which he has not found parallels in the ant world are the clergy and professorship.

Now you may say that ants certainly do not have computer programmers or bloggers in their nests. I agree, but I would try to believe Jae Choe and consider the generalized versions of these occupations so that messenger ants that spread information (using chemicals, sounds, dances) become our reporters and bloggers. The level of abstraction involved in computer programming is a little tricky to generalize, and we will probably need to get back to the author about this.

So we now know that ants do not have universities, religions, and computers. I will have to devote a post (or several posts) on the division of labor in the colony and on the occupational adventures of ants, but this post is about how ants seem to spend most of their time not working, so I will focus on that for a while.

Who has time for a picnic? Ants may look busy but looks can be misleading
Source: pixabay

Not so busy ants

Seeing the frantic movement of ants everywhere, you may have come to the conclusion that ants are busy creatures. In fact, we do say “busy as an ant,” and we create comics like this one.

If you did not click on that link, it shows an image of ants on a picnic blanket with text that proclaims that ants may be busy but they always find time for a picnic.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t always find time for a picnic. So I was intrigued to learn that worker ants spend only about 20% of their time working, and the rest of their day is spent “sitting around, doing nothing.” Jae Choe himself speaks of the experiment on which he timed the work hours, and mentions that this fits in well with the Pareto principle.

What is the Pareto principle?

This principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, originated with Vilfredo Pareto’s finding that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population in 1896. He then went on to show that 20% of the peapods in his garden produced 80% of the peas. This second example alone shows that the 80/20 rule can be applied to a wide array of cause and effect scenarios. This possibility for broad generalization usually means that we should be very careful in applying it to cause and effect scenarios.

An opinion article in The Guardian talks about how this law can be applied to everything from vocabulary usage (20% of words in 80% of usage) to internet traffic (80% of users flock to 20% of websites). It also delves into the mathematics of the power law distribution, and eventually comes to the conclusion that increasing taxes for the super rich does sound like a good idea.

On the other hand, since we have to be careful with broadly applicable laws, this blog post goes on to show why the Pareto law does not always work, with demonstrations using data on the writer's productivity and income sources.

So the point is the Pareto law works for many things, but not all things.

What has this got to do with ants?

This came up because I came across the term while reading about the fact that ants seem to work only 20% of the time. The plot thickens a little bit more, because the author also mentions that about 80% of the workers will be sitting in the nest and doing nothing at any given moment. He then proceeds to hypothesize that the inactive ants are probably reserve workforce waiting to get out and do stuff if they are needed.

As a parallel example, he mentions that human beings have been known to leave their work to go and help others in times of disasters (earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.), and ants have also probably evolved to maintain a reserve workforce because of all the disasters they have had to go through.

I’m a little late for my daily nap.
Source: pixabay

Recent scholarship on ant laziness

In 2015, Daniel Charbonneau and Anna Dornhaus from the University of Arizona published an article on inactive ants. They reported that some ants in a colony were “specialized to be inactive” and never seemed to work at all. A sciencemag article shows these numbers in an easy to understand infographic: 3% of the ants were always working, 25% were never working, and 72% were inactive almost half of the time.

Why this inefficiency?

Now if you are thinking that all this unused labor is a waste, we will have to talk about a more recent article that Daniel Charbonneau’s team published last month.

In order to see exactly what was going on in the nest, the scientists first applied paint dots on the ants such that individuals could be identified. If you would like to look at cute painted ants, you can look at a picture and also read a piece about the whole experiment here.

The painted ants acted as ants always do, and they divided themselves into the active working group and the inactive resting group. Then the researchers first removed some active ants from the colony. Within a week, inactive ants had started working in place of the lost workforce such that the activity level remained constant. The researchers then proceeded to remove some inactive ants and waited to see if some active ants would replace them and start taking rest. That did not happen. This establishes that the inactive ants are not being lazy. They are the reserve workforce of the colony, and they will promptly start working if it becomes necessary.

Higher perspective

If we look at the colony as a superorganism such that an individual ant is simply an “organ” working for the survival of the superorganism, this does make sense. The colony might be more productive if all the workers go out there and collect food all the time, but if a disaster falls upon all of them, the superorganism dies. If disaster falls upon the 20% of the ants that are active at a given time, the superorganism loses some workers and it might be weaker for a while but it still lives and it can “regenerate” the lost ants with time.

What is the conclusion?

The conclusion is that ants may not be as busy as they appear to be, but they are certainly wise. Well, the colony is certainly wise.

Thank you for reading. And do let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Links to references and image sources are provided in the text.