Sir John Lubbock gets ants drunk for science

[rubelstrudel]

There used to be a theory that ants had passwords. Ants live in colonies and they don’t let in strange ants from other colonies. This raises the question of how they know who’s who. The password theory was a bit odd, but it was reasonably popular among whimsical Victorian naturalists until it was thoroughly debunked by Sir John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, following some experiments in the 1870s:

It has been suggested that the Ants of each nest have some sign of password by which they recognize one another. To test this I made some insensible. First I tried chloroform, but this was fatal to them; and… I did not consider the test satisfactory. I decided therefore to intoxicate them. This was less easy than I had expected. None of my Ants would voluntarily degrade themselves by getting drunk. However, I got over the difficulty by putting them into whisky for a few moments. I took fifty specimens, twenty-five from one nest and twenty-five from another, made them dead drunk, marked each with a spot of paint, and put them on a table close to where other Ants from one of the nests were feeding. The table was surrounded as usual with a moat of water to prevent them from straying. The Ants which were feeding soon noticed those which I had made drunk. They seemed quite astonished to find their comrades in such a disgraceful condition, and as much at a lost to know what to do with their drunkards as we were. After a while, however, to cut my story short, they carried them all away; the strangers they took to the edge of the moat and dropped into the water, while they bore their friends home into the nest, where by degrees they slept off the effects of the spirit. Thus it is evident that they know their friends even when incapable of giving any sign or password.

Source:

Forsyth, Mark. “Evolution.” A Short History of Drunkenness. Three Rivers Press, 2017. 10, 11. Print.

Further Reading:

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, 4th Baronet, PC, DL, FRS

[contrahead]

Your topic hasn't been getting many bites, so I'll give a little contribution. I don't know about ants but members of several animal species get intoxicated on occasion – and seem to like it.

I wouldn't necessarily consider myself to have been a mean little shit when I was young. I didn't actually pull the wings off of any flies but I may have tortured a few snakes, scorpions, wasps and such. I may have put different types of ants into a jar just to watch them fight.

Many years later and living in a location more than a thousand miles away: I was in the mountains at about 8,000 ft elevation - collecting moss rocks to use on a masonry fireplace. I flipped over a flat rock that I wanted to take and saw something that few people have ever seen or ever will ever see. There were four distinct and different species of ants under that rock. Red ants, black ants (normal size), medium sized yellow ants and tiny black ants - all together under one rock. The individual ant colonies weren't centered under that same rock. It was like an underground Anasazi pit house or kiva; a meeting place where the confederation of four ant tribes congregated and kept the peace. Under the rock an “X” or cross shaped partition of dirt walls (about 4-5mm thick) separated each ant colony. Each species had a territorial corner under the rock and their seemed to be no physical communication directly under this lid.

[rubelstrudel]

Since we're on the subject of animals. My neighbour is a sheep farmer. He has about 300 breeding ewes. He told me about sheep and alcohol.

Since sheep chew cud, they have an awful lot of fermentation going on in their intestines at all time. Acording to him, alcohol is an important ingredients in the metabolism of sheep. So they're more or less constantly tipsy - but of course used to it and they aren't harmed by their own intestines. But since they're sort of a walking brewery, they really take a lot of alcohol to get them properly drunk. Say for instance you want to make one ewe, that only has one lamb, adopt a lamb with no mother. Normally that is difficult, the ewes know their kids from the smell, but if theÿ́re drunk enough they may allow another lamb to join their own lamb - they cant differentiate. But getting a sheep drunk is really expensive. You'd need about a liter of 40% to get the sheep drunk enough. We're talking about 40kg animals here. Think what a liter of vodka drained straight down would do to with a human that size.

[The Baker]

If a lamb died my uncle used to skin it. Kept the skin that was over the body and down the outside of the legs.
Then he tied it onto an orphan lamb (tied the strips of skin onto its legs).
And took it to the mother of the dead lamb. She would sniff it carefully and accept it.

Geoff

[contrahead]

Speaking of animals: I was introduced to an odd one the other day.

The “mantis shrimp” is one of the more aggressive predators in the ocean. Neither a true shrimp nor a relative of the praying mantis, yet it is reminiscent of both. They are called “thumb splitters” or “prawn killers” in some places because they're effective little predators that can defend themselves from silly humans that try to pick them up. Like “Jack Dempsey” or “Oscar” (tropical) fish you can't put one of these mantis shrimps into an aquarium with other fish or they'll kill everything else in sight. Not only that but these rascals can actually break the aquarium glass...

The approximate 450 species of mantis shrimp so far discovered pretty much come in just two varieties depending on how they use their raptorial forelegs: “smashers” or “spearers”. They have what is considered to be the fastest strike in the animal kingdom, (accelerating from 0 to 50 mph in milliseconds) which can also produce both potentially deadly shock waves and sonoluminescence (light created by imploding cavitation bubbles).

These typically solitary critters also seem to have the most complex visual system in the animal kingdom to boot. Far surpassing the human's binocular vision the mantis shrimp has incredible depth perception and can probably see clearly in both infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. Mantis shrimp's compound eyes can apparently decypher and utilize polarized light and they can actively fluoresce body parts to communicate with rivals or mates.

They make good eating in Japanese, Cantonese and Vietnamese cuisine -where their standard size might be about 4 inches in length. However they can live a long time (20-30 years) and can become much larger in some locations where they are considered invasive.

https://www.pbs.org/video/deep-look-mantis-shrimp/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow
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