Intelligence of Ants Overestimated

Stockholm, April 9. - The ant has been greatly overrated, in the opinion of Rich Ege, a Swedish naturalist. Solomon set the fashion with his famous admonition to the sluggard, and the ant has been living under false pretenses ever since. For, as matter of fact, she is a hopeless chucklehead, and to consider her ways is no way to become wise.

Mark Twain arrived at this conclusion many years ago, and science now joins hands with him in the person of Mr. Ege, who publishes the results of a series of experiments with ants. He disposes first of the insect's supposed uncanny power to recognize other tenants of its own anthill. Mr. Ege washed ants in ether, dipped them in liquid gained by pressing a number of ants from another hill, and put them back among their own friends, who promptly fell upon them and rejected them. He took ants fifty times larger than the inhabitants of a certain anthill, washed them and treated them in a liquid pressed from ants from that hill, and then placed them in it. The Lilliputian insects did not recognize the giants as invaders. Mr. Ege concludes, therefore, that the supposed remarkably sharp, recognitional powers of the insects are simply a matter of scent and inherited reflexes.

Ants removed from familiar paths blunder blindly along, with no sense of distance or direction, until they strike a trail made by other ants or themselves. In many tests made by Mr. Ege the insects disclosed, "no more intelligence than is to be found in the digestive processes of human beings." In other words, he found nearly all their acts are but movements by reflexes, unconnected with intelligence.

--The Ada Weekly News, Ada, Oklahoma, April 11, 1918, page 10.