"Erik Frank. Laurent Keller also adds that these findings 'have medical implications because the primary pathogen in ant’s wounds, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, is also a leading cause of infection in humans, with several strains being resistant to antibiotics'."

Love imagining leading scientists from big pharma rushing to investigate the compound cocktails ants are using to make the next blockbuster drug.

Mainly the Orphan Drug Act of 1983 with provided tax incentives as well as subsidized research. There is also the Rare Disease act of 2002 but that IMO is less signifigant.

Don't forget that for rare diseases affecting children the government awards fast track vouchers. These allow you to shorten the approval time of another drug (or sell it for a few hundred million for another company to do the same.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Drug_Act_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Diseases_Act_of_2002 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_review

Developing antibiotics has lower technical success rates. The medical need is more acute and distributed across more broad populations with much of them poor making patients 'harder to find'. Any novel antibiotic are typicaly held in reserve until after generation of resistance to all the current drugs, limiting volume. Commonly, physician and patient over-/mis-usage of antibiotics generates resistance, generating a limited 'valuable' life span of the drug.

There are many governmental/regulatory incentives being developed, and at least one industry-backed fund (AMR action fund) supporting early research but it’s still a challenge to build business plans for this.

Edit: it feels more like something you'd read from Adrian Czajkowski/Tchaikovsky rather than reality.

Ants farm aphids. They don't just find aphids and collect their "honeydew" excretions. They actually bring the aphids to the plants and then tend to them.

Ants harvest the sunflower seeds from my sunflowers. Not just some of the seeds. If I leave the flowers even one day past the time to harvest those seeds, the ants get every single seed. They do it by having some ants up on the flower popping out the seeds, and more ants down below collecting them off the ground. That's some incredible coordination. And these are tiny ants, not some big powerful ants. It's mind boggling to think any creature is able to pull it off. I'm honestly surprised they don't have megalithic structures built of huge stones. Though their underground colonies are megalithic in scale compared to the ants.

Maybe instead of ancient aliens we should look into ants as the actual builders of the pyramids.

https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/04/15/list-of-animals-t...

Since an LLM has no sense of self or instances, what does it mean for it to talk to itself?

In a way, doesn't it already "talk to itself" when generating sentences, e.g., its output token gets added to the input tokens successively?

If this is the basis of a mirror test, most AI recognition attempts have pretty high failure rates, so I'd say they currently fail. But if we presented a similar test to a human, "did you write this?" it seems to fall short of a mirror test because it can be falsified by an otherwise unintelligent algorithm which remembers its previous output.

While I'd be surprised to learn they have anything a normal person would call a sense of self, it would only be mild surprise and even then mainly because it means we finally have a testable definition. (Amongst other things, I don't buy that the mirror test is a good test, but rather I think it's an OK first attempt at a test).

We're really bad at this.

> In a way, doesn't it already "talk to itself" when generating sentences, e.g., its output token gets added to the input tokens successively?

I'm not sure if that counts as talking to itself or not; I think that I tend to form complete ideas first and then turn them into words which I may edit afterwards, but is that editing process "talking to myself"?

And this might well be one kind of "sense of self". Possibly.

As an observer is needed to assess the LLM, perhaps the easiest test is copy-paste between two instances and then ask chatGPT, or whichever LLM, "who were you talking to?".

I think an experiment would be to feed back whatever a LLM says to that same LLM, and see whether they’ll, at some time, say “why are you doing that to me?”

Not only do they farm aphids, they also farm fungus. Leafcutter ants bring the leaves to their fungus farm. Then they eat the fungus.

So ants farm both livestock and crops.

They also form super colonies.

My bias (for essentially aesthetic reasons) is to assume that each ant is basically pretty dumb, and the cool complex behaviors happen as an emergent property of how they respond to the stimuli they recieve (especially all the pheromone messages they get from other ants).

Ants have a similar hivemind.

It was pretty awesome.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubE9hjrsHmI

Ants: use antibiotics to treat wounds

Human: I'm not using that! It has microchips from Bill Gates in it!

Human: To keep the animals I am factory farming relatively healthy, I will regularly douse them in antibiotics!

Later: Wait why are these bacteria resistant to my antibiotics??

When ants from different colonies meet (with different genetics lineages) they fight wars of total annihilation. Ant colonies do not cooperate.

Probably the most common example is that colonies which have been around for a while and are stable often adopt new queens that turn up from outside. Then multiple queens are producing workers and you get a colony made of many distinct "families".

There are even examples of nests consisting of ants from different species. Quoting from the article I referenced earlier

> Ants engaged in parabiotic associations cooperate in a variety of ways including shared nest defense, trophallaxis, and communal use of trail pheromones. For example, “ant gardens” in the Neotropics (Davidson, 1988; Orivel et al., 1997) and in Asian rainforests (Kaufmann and Maschwitz, 2006; Menzel and Bluthgen, 2010) are often co-inhabited by species from the genera Crematogaster and Camponotus (along with a number of other genera) .... While brood chambers are kept separate, the rest of the colonies mix freely within the joint nest. In addition to sharing foraging trails to plant-based resources (Menzel et al., 2010), both species will defend the nest although larger Camponotus tend to exhibit the majority of the defensive behaviors (Menzel and Bluthgen, 2010).

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.73675...

I guess there are a couple of movies about that. :)

"Yes, the All-Wise Creator summarizes the principles of the Clear Book in most beautiful form and abbreviated fashion and with a particular pleasure and through a special need, and includes them in beings. If everything acts thus with a particular pleasure out of a particular need, it unknowingly conforms to the principles of the Clear Book." Quran's Light

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony#Colony_structure

But ants are pretty damn close to human levels of scary, IMO. Look up the acid spitting crazy ants and tell me that's not a little bit scary.

Assuming that a majority of the road traffic deaths are attributable to humans then humans seem to very easily beat mosquitos/malaria at killing other humans.

and also fungus

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-ants-becam...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-leafcutter-ants-...

Each ant could be very dumb while the system of ants as a whole are quite "smart" (I.e. exhibit complex and interesting behaviours).

Certainly individual ants learn stuff

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190778

But adaptions also happen by evolution and (very speculatively) might also happen at the colony level by it changing its responses somehow. E.g. I could imagine an ant colony suddenly faced with many attackers adapting by breeding more soldiers.

https://antsauthority.com :D

edit - didn't see eigenket's comment basically saying the same thing

I, for one, welcome our ant overlords.

I fully agree while thinking the same thing about our immune system behavior. The insanely scary impressive thing is that this level of adaptation is the rule not the anomaly in biological systems.

https://www.journalofscience.net/showpdf/MjY4a2FsYWkxNDc4NTI...

I was curious about this metapleural gland and found this article on its uses: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21504532/#:~:text=The%20meta....

The termite warriors would literally bite off the ant's limbs in 1 quick bite.

They mentioned the antibiotics allowed ants to resume basic functionality within a day. Imagine losing your arm at 9am and then still be useful by 3pm with no more than a few seconds or a minute of someone giving you antibiotics. We're not talking about regeneration here, but walking around and acting as normal as you can be given your missing limb(s).

Do you have a link?

Unfortunately no. It was probably about a year ago and searching around for "ants" videos isn't coming up with anything. I've noticed that after a while YouTube will remove the red border to indicate you've watched a video.

I can say for sure it wasn't a Kurzgesagt video, but they have a number of videos about ants. I haven't seen all of them but their videos are usually high quality: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Kurzgesagt+ants

The video I'm thinking about had pretty big black "warrior" ants scout out an area and engage with termites, I'm not sure of their species. Based on my memory it felt like a documentary style video. It was all live captured video with a narrator, not an animation.

To be honest I'm not super into ants. It was one of those videos that somehow landed in my feed and I was pleasantly surprised because I like learning about new things.

The top one ("Megaponera analis - termite predators of the african savannah") was decent although the accent was hard for me to understand. It's definitely not the video the GP referenced, though, because the narrator doesn't mention the wound treatment or antibiotics, just that the injured ants are carried home.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80213846?preventIntent=true

Also, visually very impressive documentary

What a horrible assumption I made thinking I saw this about a year ago, I got tricked into thinking it must have been a long time ago since my YouTube history was coming up empty. I did watch life on our planet shortly after it was available. This is one of the pitfalls of watching lots of media on different platforms, it all blends together. I watch a lot of documentaries on both platforms.

That's reserved for the Axolotl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl#Regeneration

so they are different terms. in another way, if the molecules will be used as drug, it probably call antibiotic.

The fact that a gland could arise through natural selection makes over 112 different components from anti-biotics to chemicals blows my mind.

The underlying theory that "random mutation" and errors in the copying of ant DNA created a secretion sac is crazy to me. I imagine this first ant was like the "Mule" in foundation, where he could introduce chemicals to "Control and conquer". There seems to be some underlying learning mechanism built within "Random mutation".

It appears that we have long known that ants, like humans, have microbiomes that produce myriad antimicrobial and antibiotic compounds (and other bioactive molecules) which they are able to make use of. [1] In this paper it sounds like there are other glands that also store and secrete these antimicrobial compounds.

So both mechanisms -- antimicrobial compounds from the microbiome and storage/secretion in glands -- most likely existed prior to the development of this specialized metapleural gland. This specific gland is used very frequently in grooming behavior. When they groom themselves, each other, the queen and larva (and even their fungal colonies in the case of leafcutters), they may massage their metaleural gland prior to this grooming to apply antimicrobials/antibiotics and reduce risk of infection. Presumably grooming behavior existed prior to this gland as well, and almost certainly involved secretions from other glands (saliva or the ant equivalent comes to mind), especially to 'clean off' old pheromones as well as crud that would interrupt signaling.

So we have pretty much all the ingredients independently for this rather specialized organ + behavior (*this is a narrative constructed via layperson reading and speculation, not in any way intended to be presented as scientific fact).

Also, I'm no biologist (let alone evolution/genetics specialist), but what I understand and what makes the most sense to me is that evolution is no longer strictly believed to occur solely on the basis of random mutations. For instance, we have a lot of evidence in very specific cases that epigenetic changes can occur in response to the environment as well as internal processes, and that these changes can be inherited and become a permanent part of the genome by various proposed mechanisms:

>There is now good evidence that epigenetic inheritance is ubiquitous and is involved in adaptive evolution and macroevolution. I argue that the many evolutionary consequences of epigenetic inheritance open up new research areas and require the extension of the evolutionary synthesis beyond the current neo-Darwinian model.

The abstract of another paper goes into more detail on how epigenetics may directly and indirectly influence evolution, if you are interested. It's mostly over my head beyond the broad strokes. [3]

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1634922/

[2] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5566804/

[3] - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.011...

Of course I wash my hands with soap very well after he does that since he obviously has many germs.

Just find that very interesting.

If it were an injury on the dog, it's very helpful for preventing infection.

However, because it's on you, it's a good way for you to get an infection and need your limbs amputated.

https://people.com/human-interest/man-who-lost-arms-legs-nos...

They get into toilet tank, cat's water bowl, flower vase, my cup, looking for nothing but water. Not once had I seen them moving any sort of food in my house, (they also doesn't seem to be interested in cat food), but they always manage to find water. I wonder how they manage such a low calorie diet.

It took quite a bit of effort to caulk every one of their entrance; which seems to be the most effective measure so far.

Prevention better than cure, as always :-).

Leave this Mixture in a shallow lid/dish next to the Ant entry point:

1 part borax dish soap

3 parts granulated sugar

15 parts warm water

They will ingest the mixture, and return the payload to the colony if dilute enough. A few days later the slow poison should start to knock out the group.

Indeed, once a path is chemically marked it is very hard to keep ants out, and failure to remove a waste bin lures them in again.

Mixing kiln dried diatomaceous earth with water for treating the surrounding external structure also helps knock down anything with a chitin exoskeleton. It can be effective if a colony has attached to a tunnel system.

Best of luck =)

1. Give them what they want. I have a bottle of cheap corn syrup I use as a truce offering. If I start getting scouts or the beginnings of an incursion I just dump a big glob of the syrup right next to their nest outside. Everyone disappears from my house within a half hour. Usually, they forget about the kitchen for a couple weeks. Then I repeat.

2. Peppermint oil. The ants here will avoid it. If I smear it across an active ant line it interrupts it even.

3. Ant moat. Works great for sugar products and pet dishes. I use 4 shot glasses full of soapy water holding up a small kitchen rack. The rack is perched on 4 small submerged pillars I added to the rack's feet.

Edit: of course an invasive species needs to be dealt with in accordance to the threat to the local ecosystem. I'm just providing options for simple nuisance ants.

Not a great idea, as people can skew the ecosystem into causing more harm. More ants can increase Aphid populations that spread viral plant diseases (see Huanglongbing or citrus greening disease).

"2. Peppermint oil."

Never tried this one, but seems expensive. Also, most mint products are illegal to import in some areas, given it can carry symbiotic fungus spores that may decimate food crops.

"3. Ant moat. "

Many species have building skills, and some will even build tiny twig/gravel roads/bridges over dangerous/irritating substances.

They are fascinating little creatures, and an important part of the ecosystem. =)

Nonsense. A wipe with plain white vinegar suffices to dissolve the pheromone trail, and seems to deter foragers for some while after.

Re: ants. A quick google suggests there could be around twenty quadrillion ants on earth. With such volume, they could literally "learn" through pure trial and error like a machine learning model.

Some pharma company will vopy the antibiotic.

Farmers will give it like candy to animals and in third world countries they will dump it to rivers.

Bacterias get resistant. So the antibiotic becomes useless for humans and then ants stsrt to die off.

turns out problem solving and intelligence don't have to be localized at all and even not having them localized doesn't necessarily hinder the ability for it to handle complex problems either