Fire ants and increased complexity

This is anecdotal and I cannot find anything on the web, but interesting. Hopefully someone will know something about this.My mom has family in Louisiana. After her last visit she told me that the fire ants in the area had stopped forming above ground mounds, much to the chagrin of those trying to kill them.This seems to me to be an increase in complexity due to the selective preasures of extensive poisoning by humans.Here's how I figure:Fire ant behavior is all nature, no nurture.The fire ants still construct underground colonies, but with no visible structure above ground. This means that the material excavated in building those colonies must be disposed of in such a way as to not form a mound above ground. As I see it, the ants must hide that material-- carry it away from the mound and scatter the material. This is more complicated behavior than simply depositting it at the opening of the tunnel.The selective pressure driving this change is the poisoning. Forming a mound is effectively drawing a target around oneself.Any comments, or infomation?------------------
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One of my high-school biology teachers was fond of pointing out that humans are selectively killing off rattlesnakes which draw attention to themselves by rattling.-Neil

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Originally posted by NeilUnreal:
One of my high-school biology teachers was fond of pointing out that humans are selectively killing off rattlesnakes which draw attention to themselves by rattling.

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-Neil

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What I've noticed about creationists is that adaptation is written off as loss of information, or de-evolution from the created kind. This effectively puts a limit on how much an organism can change-- you can only lose so much information before you have no organism at all.The rattlesnakes are, in creationists parlance, loosing genetic information. It is going to be more difficult, I think, to dismiss the fire ants because they are 'loosing' a less complicated behavior in favor of a more complicated one.------------------
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(Assuming rattlesnakes survive but lose the rattle -- unfortunately it's more likely they'll decline and other predators will fill the niche.)>John wrote: ...written off as loss of information...I did think of this, though it would be impossible to tell whether it was a loss or gain of information without investigating the mechanism. I just thought it was interesting that the actions of human beings have effectively reversed the slope of the fitness landscape for rattlesnakes with respect to a single behaviour: rattling. It suddenly (in the geological sense) went from being a warning which increased the fitness of the snake to being an encumbrance.-Neil

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Originally posted by NeilUnreal:
I did think of this, though it would be impossible to tell whether it was a loss or gain of information without investigating the mechanism.

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Agreed.

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I just thought it was interesting that the actions of human beings have effectively reversed the slope of the fitness landscape for rattlesnakes with respect to a single behaviour: rattling. It suddenly (in the geological sense) went from being a warning which increased the fitness of the snake to being an encumbrance.

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Yeah. There are many many similar cases where human interaction has effectively reversed the fitness of a behavior. Humans have been interacting for awhile now. I read something a week ago or so in which an anthropologist was commenting on the 'virgin' forests of South America. Her comment went something like, biologists see virgin forests while anthropologist see ten thousand years of human influence.------------------
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