If two large plates collide and suture together, and a small minor plate gets trapped between them, what would happen to the minor plate? Would it continually fall underneath one and get regenerated by a divergent plate boundary on the other side, creating impossibly high mountains, would it be replaced with the larger plate as it recedes beneath, would it simply fuse to the larger plate, or something else?
So I've been watching an ant trail near my window and got weirdly obsessed with this question. When ants find food, they don't just send everyone they seem to scale the number of workers to the size or value of the food source. But how?
Like, does the scout ant somehow "encode" information about: Distance to the food (longer trail = more energy burned per trip)? Type/quality of food (sugar vs. protein vs. fat)? Yield vs. effort, is it even worth mobilizing 300 workers for a dry cracker 10 meters away?
Are they actually doing some form of decentralized computation through pheromone concentration and trail reinforcement, or is it more emergent like no single ant "knows" anything, but the colony as a system arrives at an efficient answer?
And do colonies ever decline a food source because the math just doesn't work out, too far, too small, too risky?
I'm not a biologist, just genuinely mind-blown that something with a brain the size of a grain of sand seems to be running logistics better than some supply chains I've heard of.
