Ants & sleep?

[sanctus]

Two weeks ago I was camping somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Norway and when I got there, there were plenty of ants. I put my tent anyway and since it was closed well no problem.

But then around 21h all the ants where gone, to be back in the morning again.

So do ants actually go to sleep OR was it because it got cold at night (my guess is it was around 10 degrees Celsius)?

 

Also the next morning when I packed my tent obviously some ants got packed with. So when i got home I unpacked the tent to let them out. I wondered then if I should kill them, since if they are away from their clan they will be killed anyway from the clans in Oslo. Is this right?

[Knothead]

I know that my bees always return to the hive before dark. I would imagine that ants operate in a similar way. I don't know if they actually sleep, but they certainly have to rest sometime.

 

I also know that when bees are separated from their hive they will not usually be accepted into another one. They are sometimes attacked by the stranger bees but I think most of the time they just die on their own.

[dilake]

Two weeks ago I was camping somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Norway and when I got there, there were plenty of ants. I put my tent anyway and since it was closed well no problem.

But then around 21h all the ants where gone, to be back in the morning again.

So do ants actually go to sleep OR was it because it got cold at night (my guess is it was around 10 degrees Celsius)?

 

Also the next morning when I packed my tent obviously some ants got packed with. So when i got home I unpacked the tent to let them out. I wondered then if I should kill them, since if they are away from their clan they will be killed anyway from the clans in Oslo. Is this right?

 

I'm not sure if ants sleep, I have seen meat ants in outback Australia close their nest up at night and there are 3 ants outside, in the morning about 9am they open the nest up and their day begins. I don't know what happens to the ants out at night. There's also ants who are active only during the night. I read somewhere that ants have micro sleeps which last for less than a minute but have over 100 of them in a day! Who knows... I guess it depends on the type of ant.

 

A lost ant who can not get back to its colony will die (as far as I know). I'm no scientist but from what I've researched the queen is the one who controls the other ants in the nest. Her hormones controls their reactions and what they do, if a queen dies the workers lose the will to live, they don't know what to do and eventually die..... as far as I know. Again, I guess it depends on the type of ant. Hope this helps! :)

[CraigD]

Two weeks ago I was camping somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Norway and when I got there, there were plenty of ants. I put my tent anyway and since it was closed well no problem.

But then around 21h all the ants where gone, to be back in the morning again.

So do ants actually go to sleep OR was it because it got cold at night (my guess is it was around 10 degrees Celsius)?

From what I’ve read, some species of ants are diurnal, others nocturnal. I’ve never heard of a species that is active both day and night, so if you have ants during both day and night, it stands to reason that they’re of different species.

 

It’s possible, sanctus, that your camp had ants both day and night, but the nocturnal ones came out after your retired, and retired before you came out, or you simply couldn’t see the nocturnal ones in the dark.

 

Why particular species are diurnal or nocturnal involves many factors, not all of them known or well understood. Temperature is one. Though most ant species don’t have very good vision, or rely heavily on this sense (following scent trails is the way most ants navigate), some appear to determine their direction by sensing the position of the sun, so ants that don’t make it back to their nests by dusk might not make it there at all.

I know that my bees always return to the hive before dark. I would imagine that ants operate in a similar way. I don't know if they actually sleep, but they certainly have to rest sometime.

As far as I know, ants of all species sleep. According to this BBC article, typical worker ants sleep a total of about 5 hours a day, in many (about 250 a day) very short naps, while the queens sleep fewer times (about 90) but longer (about 9 hours) a day. I’ve watched worker ants in an ant farm (most ant farms have only workers, as it’s illegal in the US, and I assume most other well-regulated countries, to sell queen ants commercially), and this matches the behavior I observed.

 

Interestingly, the researchers quoted in the BBC article suspect that sleeping ants dream - though how to prove this hypothesis seems a daunting challenge!

I'm no scientist but from what I've researched the queen is the one who controls the other ants in the nest. Her hormones controls their reactions and what they do, if a queen dies the workers lose the will to live, they don't know what to do and eventually die..... as far as I know.

A little research shows that this isn’t true.

 

Unlike queen bees, who’s mating flight determines where a colony nests, queen ants have little control over their colonies, being simply “egg laying machines”. Ant colonies periodically feed some of their larvae special diets, producing new queens (and in some species, male drones) which fly off to start new colonies. After this single flight, queen ants lose their wings forever. (Source: the wikipedia article “queen ant”)

 

So, in a direct sense, the “controllers” of an ant colony are the "nursery worker" ants that feed the larvae. As they have much shorter lives (average 6 months) than queens (average 6 years, in some species 40 or more years), however, and ants seem to do everything collectively, I doubt it makes much sense to say any individual or minority of ants in a colony is “in control”. Though an oft-repeated cliché, it really makes sense to consider an entire ant colony to be an individual “hive mind”, rather than any individual ant.

[Michaelangelica]

At least one species of ant sleeps. In the July 2009 edition of the Journal of Insect Behaviour, Deby L. Cassill, Skye Brown, Devon Swick and George Yanev published an article entitled 'Polyphasic Wake/Sleep Episodes in the Fire Ant, Solenopsis Invicta'.

 

In that article, Cassill et al. found that fire ants do sleep, although the amount of sleep an individual ant had varied by caste. Workers had an average of 253 'sleep episodes' a day, but each lasted an average of only 1.1 minutes, for a total of approximately 4.8 hours of sleep overall. By contrast, queens only experienced 92 sleep episodes, but each lasted an average of 6 minutes, for a total of 9.4 hours of sleep overall.

 

In addition, the study found that fire ant sleep was unaffected by light or darkness, and that queens experienced periods of 'rapid antenna movement' sleep. The authors suggested this 'RAM' sleep might be equivalent to vertebrate REM (rapid eye movement) sleep.

WikiAnswers - Do ants sleep

[modest]

Unlike queen bees, who’s mating flight determines where a colony nests, queen ants have little control over their colonies, being simply “egg laying machines”. Ant colonies periodically feed some of their larvae special diets, producing new queens (and in some species, male drones) which fly off to start new colonies. After this single flight, queen ants lose their wings forever. (Source: the wikipedia article “queen ant”)

 

So, in a direct sense, the “controllers” of an ant colony are the "nursery worker" ants that feed the larvae. As they have much shorter lives (average 6 months) than queens (average 6 years, in some species 40 or more years), however, and ants seem to do everything collectively, I doubt it makes much sense to say any individual or minority of ants in a colony is “in control”. Though an oft-repeated cliché, it really makes sense to consider an entire ant colony to be an individual “hive mind”, rather than any individual ant.

 

I agree. I've heard an ant colony described as 100% anarchist.

 

~modest