Sunday, May 17, 2009

The Behaviour of an Drunk Ant

Right-handed ants
Mary Berenbaum
American Entomologist Volume 54 Number 1 spring 2008

In this article the author delves into the urban legend that "an ant always falls to the right when intoxicated" which she found on the website http://www.greatfacts.com/ which is full of "the most interesting and unusual facts on the net" which also notes that all the swans in England belong to Her Majesty the Queen. Her first pit-stop was a colleague who apparently knows "everything worth knowing about ants". However, he did not know the answer. Further research had to be carried out

The research began with a quick scan of the World Wide Web where she found that this fact was pretty well known. It featured in the facts link on http://www.answerbag.com/ (which also told me that snakes don't have arms and that is why they dont wear vests), http://www.britneyisdead.com/, a spoof site claiming the poptart Britney Spears was decapitated when she crashed her car during a joyride in 1998 and clues to her death can be found in the lyrics to songs performed by a lookalike who has replaced her, http://www.unsolvedmysteries.com/ which contains "a multitude of weird thing that you probably didn't know" including that the emu and the kangaroo are on the Australian caot of arms because they can't walk backwards and on http://www.ka5cvh.com/fun_stuff/jokes/worthles.htm under "worthless information" along with you can't die by holding your breath.

In a search of the more reliable library, the author happened across a book by First Baron Avebury Sir John Lubbock a scientist and naturalist, Ants, Bees and Wasps. A Record of Observations on the Habits of the Social Hymenoptera. published in 1884. This book contained and experiment involving ants and alcohol but focussed on how the sober ants treated their drunk fellows rather than how the tipsy ones behaved. Incidently 32 of the 41 intoxicated ants were carried back to the nest whilst the other nine were tossed into a pool of water possibly to sober up by their presumably disgusted mates.

Well the author never did discover which way an ant would fall after a hard night on the booze, but she found some videos on YouTube of university students that are enclined to eat the picked worms at the bottom of miscal after drinking the stuff.

Update: here are a couple of videos thanks to YouTube for your viewing pleasure. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oux_AvN3uww, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P-qnufs0SA&feature=related.

4 comments:

  1. Use photos to make it more interesting. Very interesting article I like it. You should try this with humans to see what happens.

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  2. I'm pretty sure that I've had drunk friends thrown into water also. We're just like ants!!!

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  3. You will have to undertake a little experiment of your own. I can just imagin you collecting ants with your 'pooter' and feeding them some vodka!!!! Some pictures are always good to keep us fickle readers interested. Great article very readable.

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  4. It's funny that sometimes scientists make researches on things which don't have any importance... in natural conditions ants are never drunk, aren't they? Knowing the behaviour of sober ants face to their tipsy fellow is without any implication. It's only curiosity, I like it.

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