Look at the Ant!

I discovered a unique behavior of the ant and how they apply to our spiritual walk.

If you give an ant a cookie, he’ll carry it back to his nest because ants can carry things many times their body weight. If you give an ant a much larger cookie, it will try to drag it back to the nest, tragically wandering in the wrong direction. But they do have one trick up their itty-bitty sleeves: peeking. About a third of the backward-moving ants in these experiments dropped their cookie bits to look around. They took a few steps around, returned to the cookie, and headed off—this time in the correct direction. Once they did that, they kept a straight path—going backward—using the sun’s location as a celestial compass. Dung beetles use the same technique to roll their poop balls backward.

So, once they peek (as seen in the video above), the ants know precisely where they’re going and can get home just like the forward-facing ants do. That doesn’t seem all that revolutionary. Of course, turning around helps you figure out where to walk. Here’s the thing: the fact that ants can look forward, recognize where to go, turn around to retrieve their cookie, and then drag it in the correct direction is a remarkably complex process. It means they’re translating a simple sense of which path to follow into a more holistic sense of where they are in the world. It’s like the difference between knowing that you must make two rights and a left to get home and understanding where you and your home are in space and navigating between them without a given route.

That’s not a perfect analogy, but you get the picture: ants seem to have a complex understanding of their place in the universe, which is unique. Even more impressive: not only do scientists know what kind of cookies ants are fond of, but they know exactly how small to make a crumb to allow an ant to carry it home. Researchers know more about ant cookie-lifting capabilities than I know about myself. 

Worker ants’ ability to carry their body weight many times is well documented. Still, new research on heavy-lifting ants reveals that the neck joint of a typical American field ant can withstand pressures up to 5,000 times greater than its body weight.

Discovering the “Wisdom of Ants” and how we can apply a few interesting.

Characteristics of the “ant” to our own life.

• They know where they are in the world and their place in the universe.  
• They can navigate between the obstacles without a given a route to reach their destination  
• The ant, although capable of lifting much more weight, precisely knows the weight it can carry to get home
• Using the sun as a celestial compass (The ant’s celestial compass system: spectral and polarization channels)