When they stir, she'll return them to the nest, then laboriously track the peregrinations of individuals over the next several days. She'll compare what happens in this colony to another one nearby. Deborah Gordon sucks up harvester ants in the Arizona desert to try to explain how their biological systems works. This meticulous procedure is typical of animal behavior research in the field, in which scientists study the interactions of animals in nature. People talk about 'eliminating the noise,' but of course you never really eliminate the noise.
Variation is precisely what makes the work so interesting.
Through this kind of tracking over the years, Gordon has found that workers rapidly switch jobs when conditions change. In an array of experiments Gordon has simulated floods, storms, and attacks by neighbors and then charted the colonies' varied responses. She's chronicled the inter-relationships between colonies, trying to crack the code of how ants together respond to change. What the biologist has discovered by charting the life cycles of 300 ant colonies spread across a 25-acre swath of chapparal are findings which upset many of our assumptions about how the world works. Forget about Hollywood's he-man soldiers and workers constrained by class.