Temporal Divisions of Labor, Roman Beatniks, and Facebook Notifications

Today I Learned:
1) Many ants and other social insects (I'm going to just say "ant" as shorthand for "social insect") have something called a temporal division of labor. What that means is that over time, an individual ant will change what jobs they do.

Specifically, in almost every case, young ants perform tasks close to the eggs, near the center of the nest, and as they age they take on tasks farther and farther from the center of the nest. The oldest ants take on foraging rolls and spend most of their time completely outside the nest. One rather elegant theory to explain the temporal division of labor is the "centrifugal theory", which says that ants start doing tasks wherever they're hatched, and sort of diffuse away as they age by random motion. Ants switch behaviors rather readily, so the idea is that they get bumped around from task to task, and the net bumping moves them farther and farther from their place of birth in more or less the same way molecular diffusion makes dye spread in water.

It's an elegant theory, but one that is falsified by a number of observations and experimental findings (for instance, there's at least one species of ant where the ants pupate and hatch far from the eggs, but still begin life by heading straight for the egg chambers and taking care of the eggs there). Indeed, in honeybees, there is a known program of hormone-controlled aging that causes bees to switch tasks over time (another little TIL: mankind has known that bees age, and that foraging bees are the eldest bees, since at least Aristotle). So for whatever reason, it seems that social insects are genetically programmed to take on tasks farther and farther from the center of the nest as they age.

2) Julius Ceasar, the first Emperor of Rome, was something of a counterculture figure of his time. Espeically early in his political career, Ceasar wore very unusual clothes -- for instance, he wore his toga loose-belted, with long sleeves. He was kind of the popular spearhead of a whole movement of antitraditionalism in the Republic.

Others of his generation did strange things like wearing goatees and togas made of gauze-like fabric, or holding parties where attendees would dance naked on the tables. They wrote poetry and literature that didn't fit old Grecian forms, and they espoused living for the moment rather than for service to the community. It was quite an interesting time to be a Roman, from the sound of it.

3) Facebook will not notify you if a post appears with your name in it, but not tagged. Thanks to Meaghan Sullivan for unwittingly testing this for me!