A Japanese friend of mine told me about an
interesting item she saw on the news recently.
She told me that some Japanese researchers had studied the behaviour of
worker ants and found that some of them are “lazy”. They stay in their nest and don’t seem to do
much while the rest of the worker ants are busy keeping the nest clean and foraging
for food.
I thought it was a fascinating story. You naturally hear about lazy ants and wonder
whether there are any parallels in human society. Am I one of the lazy 20 per cent? Am I one of
the hard working 80 per cent?
So when I got home I searched the internet
to try to find some news articles about the ants. In the course of doing my research, I came up
with my own theory to explain what the seemingly lazy ants are really
doing. They have tiny little
smartphones, too small to be noticed by the researchers. And they are sitting at home, posting angry
comments on blogs. How did I come up
with this remarkable theory? I will tell
you.
Searching for a story about lazy ants, I
quickly came across a Japan Times article on this research. It told me some basic facts: that the study
was done by researchers at the University of Hokkaido; that they found 20 per
cent of the ants were doing no work; and that the other 80 per cent were having
to work harder on their behalf. The
article also then said that even if the hardest workers were removed, the 20
per cent of “lazy” ants did not change their behaviour.
This last point confused me, since it
seemed to say the exact opposite of what my Japanese friend had told me. “Oh, well,” I thought. She must have misunderstood the story.
Rather than relying on a single source for
my information, I continued searching the internet to see if I could find any
other articles talking about this study.
I next found a blog which had posted a link to the Japan Times article
and had lots of comments from readers underneath the link. Some of the comments were funny, some were
defensive about the benefits of being lazy, some used the study to “prove” that
people (yes, human beings) receiving welfare benefits were lazy and
should have their benefits taken away from them. It’s quite impressive to see what leaps
in logic can be made from a short article about ants.
I still couldn’t rely on this as
confirmation that the Japan Times article was accurate, since the blog was
using the exact same article for its information.
So I then found another article discussing
the research. This was from Mainichi,
another major Japanese newspaper. It
quoted some of the same facts, but was a longer article giving more
details. And the details it gave were
rather surprising! For example, it said
that if the 20 to 30 per cent (not 20 per cent, you will notice) of “lazy” ants
were all removed from the colony, leaving only “hard working” ants, then 20 or
30 per cent of the “hard working” ants stopped working and became inactive. In other words, it seems that having a per
centage of ants in the colony doing nothing is actually important for the
survival of the colony.
The article then went on to say that the
researchers had done computer models to show that if all of the ants worked
hard, then they would all become tired at the same time. This would prove disastrous for the colony as
none of the ants would be able to look after the eggs for a time.
Someone reading only the Mainichi article
would get the completely opposite impression from the research than someone who
only read the Japan Times article. All
of the people who were writing their comments on another blog about removing
“lazy” humans’ benefits were ironically too lazy themselves to check the
information they were talking about.
Now you can see how obviously true my
theory is. The inactive ants are just
sitting around, playing with their smartphones and submitting comments to
blogs. Rumours that one of the ants
contributes articles to a major Japanese newspaper cannot be confirmed at this
time.
Vocabulary:
to forage – of a person or animal, to
search widely for food or provisions
to come across – to find something by
chance
welfare benefits – money paid by
governments to people in need, such as the unemployed, disabled etc.
a leap – a large jump
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