Five two-day old (based on their lighter color) majors waiting for their exoskeletons to harden. I remember what a big deal it was for me when this colony raised their first major! Now they raise up new generations in bulk. Camponotus discolor (little red ruby carpenter ants)
ant mentality: "If one is good twenty-one is better."
This new batch of majors is nearly identical. Although looking closely I can detect small differences. One has wrinkles between her eyes, another has slightly longer scapes on her antennae. I wonder if ants can tell other ants apart? Or if any sister (of a particular size) is interchangeable? I wonder if ants tend to work with the same ants from day to day, possibly simply based on being the same age and size.
They *do* have different personalities. That I've proven to myself beyond any doubt. Some ants are shy, some bold. They attack problems in different ways. They give up more or less easily. But that isn't surprising. If every ant did the same thing their spamy brute force method of solving problems wouldn't work.
It'd be as if all the monkeys with typewriters wrote the exact same sequence of characters in unison.
@futurebird As with humans and machine learning ensemble models, diverse teams perform better.
Do ants ever cooperate with other species? I know birds have multi-species flocks.
