Can an ant be employee of the month?
Ants specializing on one job such as snatching food from a picnic are no more efficient than “Jane-of-all-trade” ants, according to new research. The finding casts doubt on the idea that the world-wide success of ants stems from job specialization within the colony. Ants are found on every continent besides Antarctica. “The question is, why is job specialization a good thing?” said Anna Dornhaus of The University of Arizona in Tucson. “We thought that the fact that ants have specialists was one of the things that made them so successful and live all over the world in all habitats in great numbers. “It turns out that the ones that are specialized on a particular job are not particularly good at doing that job.” Dornhaus studied the rock ant, known by scientists as Temnothorax albipennis, that lives in cracks in rocks in Europe. In ant colonies, all the workers are females. She videotaped individual ants as they performed four typical ant tasks: brood transport, collecting sweets, foragi
