"How do ants decide what they want to do?"
"How do ants decide what they want to do?"
This is a seemingly simple question, but it has deep implications. How do ants decide to forage, care for young, feed the queen, attack the enemy, repair the nest... how do they pick a task? How often do they reevaluate?
However ants may choose it must take into account the status and needs of the entire colony. But, ants have very small brains. They probably only know a little bit about the world around them, so the needs of the colony must be inferred from sparse and local (to the ant) information.
In species with polymorphism the decision must take into account the size of the ant and what tasks she is best suited for. A solider ant will try to care for the young if no one else is doing that job. But, more often she will sleep or patrol and leave the nurse work it to small ants.
You may see a tiny nurse ant trying to help kill a delicious cricket ... but mostly she would rather feed the queen, or the babies. All ants can try to do all tasks ... with the exception of laying eggs, only the queen can do that task.*
*some species have gamergates, workers who become egg laying queens when the queen dies, so even egg laying can be a shared task. However, the danger of the colony wasting too much energy in fights over who gets to lay is averted in most cases by having a single queen.
