I have a couple ant nests on my property and have witnessed several crows at a time land on the nests and do this behaviour on multiple occasions.
What ever the reason the bigger ants are allowing this to happen I am convinced that there is some sort of beneficial reason.
"Commissioner: Leiningen, you're up against a monster twenty miles long and two miles wide... forty square miles of agonizing death! You can't stop it!"
-- quote from The Naked Jungle.
Trivia - I believe this is from where Clojure got their build tool name.
The Brazilian official threw up lean and lanky arms and clawed the air with wildly distended fingers. "Leiningen!" he shouted. "You're insane! They're not creatures you can fight--they're an elemental--an 'act of God!' Ten miles long, two miles wide--ants, nothing but ants!”
Even before you get to the literal kilograms of bacteria, fungi and other fauna in our guts we’re a whole world unto ourselves.
We just don’t usually notice.
The fishes histories go back thousands of years. As a species it is super interesting... some evolved in hot-spring conditions that would simply cook most other animals. =3
Because there hasn’t been enough time and the ecological niche is non existent… ?
However… upon further inspection, one could argue that the micro biome is full of beneficial micro organisms that have evolved to fill this niche…
[1] Staphylococcus epidermidis
This is one of the most abundant and beneficial bacteria on human skin. It produces antimicrobial peptides and metabolites that inhibit the growth of pathogenic bacteria.
[2] Cutibacterium acnes
Despite its association with acne, this bacterium actually plays an important role in skin health by producing propionic acid, which helps maintain skin pH and prevents overgrowth of harmful organisms.
[3] Corynebacterium species
Various corynebacteria colonize the skin and produce lipases and other enzymes that help break down sebum (skin oils) and maintain healthy skin conditions.
[4] Malassezia species
These yeasts are abundant on skin and help regulate the skin microbiome, though they can sometimes cause issues in excess.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staphylococcus_epidermidis
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutibacterium_acnes
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13070876/
Mark W. Moffett. The First Cleaner Ant? A Novel Partnership in the Arizona Desert. Ecology and Evolution, 2026; 16 (4) DOI: 10.1002/ece3.73308
It would be interesting to learn if this occurs with other species of ants. I suppose until now nobody thought to look.
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 societies
Both 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.
I would highly recommend you read through the paper. Alongside these "advanced in individuality" comes reduced (internal) competition.
I agree that both are important but competition only seems to be important at the very edges of what selection is acting upon while cooperation is truly "fundamental"
I don't know of any cases of direct kidney v lung competition, but competition among body parts is common. Sometime that competition is adaptive, sometimes not. Examples of adaptive competition are things like when under extreme circumstances (particularly cold or hunger) your body will sacrifice parts of itself to keep other parts going. Examples of non-adaptive competition are things like autoimmune diseases. Also, sometimes individual cells go rogue and stop cooperating. That's called cancer.
> competition only seems to be important at the very edges of what selection is acting upon
I guess that depends on what you consider "the edges". In the case of humans, selection produces intuitions about "us vs them". Those intuitions range from very closely drawn boundaries ("us" includes only my immediate family or clan) to very broadly drawn boundaries ("us" is my entire species, or my entire phylum, or all living things). In between are things like "us" is all members of my species with my skin color. But the extremes of this range are non-adaptive. Draw the boundaries too narrowly and you end up without enough genetic diversity in your in-group to drive out maladaptive mutations. Draw them too broadly and you end up defenseless against parasites and with nothing to eat.
Your body prioritizing which parts to keep alive for the survival of the whole ship is not an example of competition. Competition would be if a body part actively attacked another body part. In this case, survival of the entire body will eventually benefit all body parts
> I guess that depends on what you consider "the edges"
The "edges" as thoroughly defined in the paper I linked. Major evolutionary transitions in individuality (METI). METI is a widely accepted framework in biology
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about this. I don't see a lot of daylight between "active attack" and starvation of resources. Just because your attacker chooses to lay siege to you rather than mount a full frontal assault doesn't make them any less of an attacker IMHO.
> The "edges" as thoroughly defined in the paper I linked.
Sorry, I don't see it. AFAICT the word "edges" only appears once in the paper:
"Evolution is a process of continuous change, and so we should expect blurry edges with a mosaic of features (1)."
[UPDATE] Oh, BTW, I think that paper is actually very good. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
That is in no way at odds with what I said.
- picking a good location for a cleaning station requires long-term planning and real strategic judgment;
- deciding which hosts to accept is a complex skill requiring some sort of rudimentary theory of mind + long-term development of social ties;
- like crows, cleaner fish are jerks who constantly try to screw each other over, so there is something of a cognition arms race.
I will add that the wrasse family of cleaner fish use rocks to smash open shellfish (i.e. they are tool-users), and they have very complex group strategies for raising their young. In fact I'm not convinced that wrasse evolved to be cleaner fish at all: they are natural scavengers and scum-suckers, perhaps cleaning stations are a form of cultural technology.
I would be extremely surprised if any of this was true for cone ants. I suspect that is more hard-wired, perhaps a local subspecies stumbled into a genetic fluke, and as you say due to game theory it is a local optimum this population has settled on. If this behavior were common like it is in vertebrates, we probably would have seen it earlier. But who knows? 20 years ago I would have thought "fish have a form of culture" is too ridiculous an idea to consider.
[1] Seriously: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cusj/blog/vi... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-25837-0
OK.
> Cleaner fish are highly intelligent[1]
Yes.
> and it appears that this intelligence is necessary
Manifestly not, at least not in general.
> for their niche:
That is an open question. Just because an unintelligent cleaner fish hasn't evolved doesn't mean it couldn't.
It truly is the oldest profession.