S C I E N C E   F R I D A Y ®       Questions about the show? mail them to scifri@npr.org Questions/Comments about this site? Send them to producer@ sciencefriday.com Web Producer: Charles Bergquist Executive Web Producer: Ira Flatow © 1998, All Rights Reserved.             Last week, we asked you to tell us about insects in our SciFri Pop Quiz. The answers: Spider silk is about five times stronger than steel, on a weight-for-weight basis. The movie "Arachnophobia" was released in the summer of 1990. It was the 11th highest grossing movie that summer, luring in over $53 million. Do ants think? Well, we don't know... but 70% of respondents said yes! Congratulations to this week's winner, chosen randomly from those listeners with two correct answers and some answer to the third question - Andrew Trapp from Urbana, IL! He wins a copy of "The Best of the Annals of Improbable Research," edited by Marc Abrahams. Here's Andrew Trapp's answer. Ants think about finding and harvesting food, defending their colony, and serving their queen. And here's a randomly selected example of someone with the opposite opinion, sent in by Jlsteinman. No, the actions of ants are controlled by pheromones, which are produced by the queen. Ants think of nothing. One of this week's guests, Steve Mirsky, has the following answer: My opinions are whatever E.O. Wilson thinks. However, if you can't find him for comments, I think that ants definitely think. Especially leaf-cutter ants. They think about diversifying their agricultural empire by rotating their crops, but they never get around to it. Ants also think about other ants. These thoughts include things like "my brother can only lift five times his own body weight, the little wimp." They muse philosophical over whether they are indeed individuals or merely the equivalent of cells in a single body. But seriously, I think it was Wittgenstein who said that if a lion could talk we would still not be able to understand what it was saying. This would be the result of the lion's life experience being so foreign to us as to render its thoughts indecipherable. Yet think it would. Ants may indeed require some degree of what we would call thought. But the concept of thought itself is a human construct. Ants are clearly very good at what they do and perhaps that is the best we can say about them. Marc Abrahams, also a guest this week, comments... This is an unfair question. Many (human) psychologists now say they don't know how to measure intelligence in humans, let alone ants. So let's re-phrase the question and try it again: 1. Do ants have multiple intelligences? 2. Pound for pound, which is smarter - an ant, a Manx cat, or a whale? Want to give that one a try? Send us your answers... Thanks to all of you who took the time to write in!