Discussion

Scientists discover “cleaner ants” that groom giant ants in Arizona desert

awinter-py: this is no surprise to anyone who has read dougal dixon's 'man after man'

LeCompteSftware: This is very cool, and quite surprising. Cleaner fish are thought to be among the most intelligent fish because of the complexity and danger of their feeding strategy: it takes careful planning and quick thinking. But they aren't tied to any particular species of host or general tactic; naively I imagine cleaner fish are more versatile and adaptable than cone ants.It would be interesting to learn if this occurs with other species of ants. I suppose until now nobody thought to look.

lisper: Cooperation and symbiosis are very general survival strategies. They apear at all levels of the biological abstraction hierarchy, all the way down to mitochondria, which are almost certainly descended from what was once an independent organism. No intelligence is required for cooperation to evolve. It's a straightforward consequence of game theory.

fsckboy: mmmm it's equally likely that mitochondria's precursors were self interested parasites or predators, whose negative effects were competitively neutralized by defensive host adaptations that exploititively colonialized them. No intelligence or cooperation is required for co-opt-ation to evolve. It's a straightforward consequence of game theory.

awakeasleep: why haven't any animals adapted to this role for humans!

encrux: In a Sense, cats did actually. Not through direct contact, but by getting rid of mice and rats that infiltrate food storage.

culi: Yes! Cooperation seems to be just as fundamental, if not more, than competition. We wouldn't have gotten volcanic islands to break down into soil if it weren't for the partnership that is lichen. We wouldn't be able to digest a tenth of what we're able to eat if it weren't for our gut bacteria. We wouldn't have trees if it weren't for mycorrhizal fungi which over 90% of plants depend on.There's a famous paper/framework called "Major evolutionary transitions in individuality" that sketches out a big picture pattern of major evolutionary advances in complexity following a surprisingly consistent pattern: As cooperation and division of labor strongly increase, selection starts working on larger entities. This pattern holds all the way back to the origin of life itself as things moved from self-assembling molecules to compartmentalized populations of molecules, from replicators to chromosomes, from RNA+enzymes to DNA+proteins, from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells, from unicellular to multicellular, from individuals to colonies/superorganisms, and (possibly) onwards to more complex societieshttps://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1421402112

lisper: > Cooperation seems to be just as fundamental, if not more, than competitionBoth are fundamental. You can't survive without cooperating, but you also can't survive if you try to cooperate with the entire biosphere because ultimately there is competition for scarce resources. If you don't assert yourself to claim your share of those, something else will.

buildbot: Cat’s will also literally try to clean you as well!