Rock Ants are Discerning Home Owners, Study Suggests

Rock ants in Britain have been shown displaying behaviors similar to prospective human home buyers when seeking refuge, new research published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters suggests, adding that the ants do so with an effectiveness that it "puts many of us to shame."

The ants, which are constantly seeking the most ideal environment for their queen, have been shown effectively (and continually) monitoring nearby available real estate and noted staying put when the living is good while quickly moving in to better digs if their living situation is less than ideal.

"This strategy of adjusting their information gathering according to their actual needs and the real value of higher rungs on the property ladder, may help ants to evaluate their housing market in a measured and thorough way that puts many of us to shame," said University of Bristol researcher Carolina Doran.

Rock ants (Temnothorax albipennis) are a species native to Europe that build simple nests in rock crevices which they seal off with tiny pebbles and grains of sand.

In a previous experiment, the rock ants were shown to always choose the smallest available building materials, despite the practice of gathering tiny grains of sand is much less efficient and more laborious than building nests out of larger materials.

Another experiment on rock ants revealed interesting division of labor in colonies. In small colonies, there tends to be a small set of high performance workers that preformed tasks at a much higher efficiency than other ants in the colony.