In one of my favorite movies, “The Girl in the Café,” the two main characters jokingly discuss whether Reykjavik, Iceland, might be the kind of thing about which everyone knows only one fact.
Ants are one of those kinds of things. Some people know ants can carry 50 times their own weight, or that fire ants can kill birds and small mammals. Others know several species of ants capture other ants and use them as slaves, that some ants keep aphids and milk them like cows, or that all species of ants are social.
A recent study at the University of Bristol in England is attempting to add to the list of facts about ants by claiming that ants teach one another.
In the journal Nature, Nigel Franks is quoted as saying, “Within the field of animal behavior, we would say an animal is a teacher if it modifies behavior in the presence of another, at cost to itself, so another individual can learn more quickly.”
Because the researchers gathered such detailed analysis of ant behavior over quite a length of time, Franks feels strongly that the ants are actually passing along information about routes in a way consistent with teaching. They observed leader ants paying attention to follower ants, slowing down if they got behind and speeding up when the followers got closer. Follower ants even tapped the leaders with their antennae when they’d mastered a section, which made the leader go to the next part of the lesson.
When the leaders went on the route by themselves, they went four times faster than when they were showing other ants the way.
An article in the Washington Post by Shankar Vedantam points out that Nigel Franks’ paper has started an argument about what, exactly, can be labeled as teaching.
Is teaching just communication of information? If I tell a child where the silverware drawer is, have I taught them anything? Or just given them information?
How you answer depends on your definition of teaching.
Marc Hauser, a professor at Harvard, says a transfer of information isn’t teaching – teaching requires that the student learn a new skill. For example, giving a child the information that 2 plus 2 equals 4 counts as teaching only if they grasp the underlying concept of addition and become able to go on and add other numbers.
In the Washington Post article, “Ants Are First Non-Humans to Teach, Study Says,” Hauser talks about research done by Tim Caro which shows that cheetah mothers “…gradually allow their cubs to do more of the hunting – going, for example, from killing a gazelle and allowing young cubs to eat to merely tripping the gazelle and letting the cubs finish it off.” Of this, Hauser points out, “...the mother was not really teaching the cubs to hunt but merely facilitating various stages of learning.”
This guy is tough to please.
Handing over of facts isn’t teaching. Facilitating stages of learning isn’t teaching. According to him, only a genuine skill existing inside the student that wasn’t there before allows anyone to truthfully say they’ve taught someone.
While I would never want teaching to consist of ONLY a transfer of facts, it seems to me the teaching of skill can’t happen without a base of facts being given. And it would be impossible to pinpoint the dividing line.
Teaching historical facts about wars and treaties turns into the skill of understanding the types of things that start and end conflict.
Teaching the periodic table of the elements leads to the skill of being able to correctly predict the stability of various elements in different situations.
Good teachers can tell the difference between the students who have facts without yet having developed the desired skill, and the students who have both. But this doesn’t mean teachers know exactly how or when the kids in the second group graduated from the first group.
Bert Holldobler and Edward Wilson list a number of facts in their book, Journey to the Ants. Such as: There are one million trillion (10 with eighteen zeroes) insects alive at any one moment; ten thousand trillion of those insects are ants; the combined total weight of ants on earth is roughly equal to the total weight of humans; about 9,500 species of ants are known, and scientists believe at least twice as many species of ants have yet to be discovered.
Franks and Hauser may debate whether being given this information teaches us anything, but there’s no question that every bit of information we gain – even if it’s only one fact about ants or Reykjavik – builds a framework that makes learning more likely.
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