Ants release chemicals when they die that attract other ants, to fight off the threat. This is annoying, because squishing an ant that bit you is likely to attract more bitey ants.
Do ants have a chemical signal for “all ye who enter here, either turn back or abandon all hope”? Can you teach a hive to fear a certain place? Or do they just keep coming forever?
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HEY ANTS!
This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
I personally feel like we should institute a priesthood of ant-scarers in addition to signage warning them of the honorless dangers.
Ant from colony JK4930-1 here, apologies, we were mislead by “Here be food” pheromones, we will turn back now
Fear is an emotion, and we can’t know about whether animals (or depending on where you fall on the qualia debate, other humans) feel that emotion. We can measure their behavior, though, and there are a great many studies on animal fear and avoidance behaviors, including ants.
Ants don’t have a memory in the sense that you or I think of. There is no collective memory of “avoid that place” that lives in the minds of ants or a hive because some ants had a bad time in that place, as far as we can tell. However ants deposit pheromones as they navigate the world. Other ants follow along later and maintain or update these pheromone “trails” (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4590477/). Ant pheromone signaling is a deep body of research but there are both positive (go this way) and negative (don’t go this way) signals.
Ants have a memory. Their memory is written on the world in pheromones. Just like human memory is kept in books.
Human memory is kept in our brains. You’re using precise words - like memory - imprecisely
Ants don’t like cinnamon, of that’s worth anything. Sugar ants don’t, at least; I don’t know how fire ants feel about it.
You are actually asking two questions, both rather complicated.
- Is there a chemical that induces avoidance in ants (or at least some ant species)?
- Can you teach ants to avoid an odor.
After a quick glance at the literature, I’d say that there are some chemicals that induce avoidance.
But I was frankly too lazy to look into the learning aspect.1 of my Soul’s/Continuum’s previous-incarnations was as a bee/hornet/wasp life, & I got to experience a taste of that sentience, decades ago…
I’d say no, for the simple reason that their sentience-on-brain is so incredibly efficient, & there’s no … material-basis … wasted on that specific kind-of-mind…
There is hesitancy, but ?fear? … it doesn’t fit the Soul-memory right…
( the bee/hornet/wasp family is cladistically/genetically flying-ants, with mutations, so this is actual-relatives )
When you see opposing kinds of ants, each with their fighters lined-up, opposite each-other…
that’s about as close as you could get to “fear”, right?
In that role, there’s applying-threat/force & there’s hesitancy, balancing between, but … I’m not finding, in my Soul-memory of that category-of-life, fear.
Notice, also, that when an ant comes back with an injury, other ants will prune their limbs to limit risk-of-infection, if required… ( recent news, that ), so they’re kinda really pragmatic about things like amputations, you know?
Here’s a simple method for usually getting someone of the bee/hornet/wasp family out from your home, if they get in…
I’m presuming a house, not an apartment-building with sealed-outer-envelope/wall…
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make certain you haven’t got what they register as FOOD or something smelling openly, as scent overrides thinking, throughout much of the animal-kingdom, so no perfume, no open garbage-can with whatever they eat ( wasps eat meat ) overriding their will…
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block & darken the paths you don’t want them going
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brighten & open the paths you do want them going ( porch light on, to lighten that path, e.g. )
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if you have to wave your arms gently, wide, to catch their attention, to get them to intentionally-look-there, do so, then simply have one’s arms at one’s side, & hold still ( you don’t need to move slowly for them: they live MUCH quicker than humans do: I saw a man falling, & it was taking ages, in that previous-incarnation )…
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keep your eyes slitted, as they’ll try flying into your eyes, because the dark-pupil looks to them like a home-sized opening… ( a beekeeper told me this single point, all the rest is of my Soul-memory/experience )
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they should “swim” ( it feels like swimming, to them: sentience feels wet, in their crustaceans-living-in-the-air lives ) into the open-luminance, leaving your home, happily…
I’ve tried this, & it only works with that family: it doesn’t work with blackflies, it doesn’t work with mosquitos, it doesn’t work with beetles, etc…
So, it matches my Soul-memory experience’s prediction of their sentiences’ behavior.
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