Are Ants self-aware?
This morning I watched a video from YouTuber Anton Petrov ('Why Did Consciousness Evolve?'). This was primarily about birds but at one point he mentioned there was research suggesting that even ants might be self-aware.
I found this idea quite startling, so I did some reading and eventually managed to track down a couple of relevant references [1][2]. There is indeed some research, although the findings are far from conclusive and it isn't really clear what if anything the study demonstrates. But it is certainly a very intriguing possibility. The research used the 'mirror test', a well known approach you may have heard of.[3]
The test is design to see if an animal, when looking in a mirror, is somehow aware that what they see is 'them'. Thus of course does not imply consciousness but it does point to some kind og bodily self-awareness.
The usual approach is to put a small coloured marker on the animal's head, in a position that means the animal can't see it directly but will be able to when looking in a mirror. The the animal is then placed in a space where there is a mirror and the experimenter watches for sign the animal has seen itself in the mirror, noticed the marker, and responded, by grooming itself or seeming to be trying to remove the marker. If so, it is argued that it must have recognised that what it saw in the mirror was itself.
Naturally the various factors in the experiment must be systematically varied. Some animals are marked but not put with mirror, some are put with mirrors but not marked, some neither of those, some marked but with markers that are indistinguishable from the animal's natural colouration, and so on.
This experiment has a long and interesting history and been done with many kinds of animal[4]. It seems generally accepted a demonstrating self awareness of some sort in a very wide range of animals.
But the study on ants has been controversial, because of factors such as sample size and poor controls. Controls are inevitably a problem with this sort of experimental setup. For example how can you make it double-blind? And then the observer may be biassed in favour of a positive result, but what counts as positive is just a matter of interpretation. And perhaps mirrors and stickers do not alone change ant behaviour but the combination does, but not because the ant recognises itself, but for some other reason.
So although this is a very intriguing study I think we should be cautious about jumping to conclusions. But it is part of a larger body of work which I think makes it clear that, in the past, we often have massively underestimated the cognitive abilities of many of our fellow creatures.
[2] https://difusion.ulb.ac.be/vufind/Record/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/219269/Holdings