Ants are less diligent than previously thought

Anyone who has played Dwarf Fortress will know that it's usually unwise to get to 0 idlers. In cases of sieges or megabeasts, you need some first responders ready and not exhausted/occupied with other things. I wonder if this happens with ants. The idlers eat less food and can just store the energy. When a colony starts to run out, just send out half of those idlers in different directions to scavenge.

I suspect that observing multiple generations of ants would give the answers for those questions. My guess is that the 25% which are permanent idlers are the older ants (retired) or injured ones (permanently disabled)

Come on idler....it's a web article, so there's no excuse not to have a link to the original paper itself!

We may only just know that ants are lazy, but we've known all along humans are too lazy to do a google scholar search ;)

Seriously though - pet peeve = science stories with no direct links for references.

This is why I am not worried about AI. The smarter you are the less "diligent" you need to be :)