No ant can possibly know how much food everybody is collecting, how many foragers are needed, she said. An ant has to have very simple rules that tell it, OK, switch and start foraging. But an ant cant assess globally how much food the colony needs.

　　Ive done perturbation experiments in which I marked ants according to what task theyre doing on a given day. The ants that were foraging for food were green, those that were cleaning the nest were blue and so on. Then I created some new situation in the environment; for example, I create a mess that the nest maintenance workers have to clean up or Ill put out extra food that attracts more foragers.

　　It turns out that ants that were marked doing a certain task one day switch to do a different task when conditions change.

　　Of about 8,000 species of ants, only about 10 percent have been studied thus far.

　　Its hard to generalize anything about the behavior of ants, Gordon said. Most of what we know about ants is true of a very, very small number of species compared to the number of species out there.

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