Lazy ants actually exist (and the band name is taken)

Clay Thompson is on vacation. Here’s a column from Sept. 21, 2011:

Today’s question:

I have always wondered if there is such a thing as lazy ants, ones that sneak away and take naps while everyone else is hard at work.

I was just going to throw this one away because it sounded kind of silly. But then if I threw out all the silly questions I get from you people, I wouldn’t have much to do. And like so many of the seemingly silly questions I get, this one turned out to be pretty interesting. It turns out that there is such a thing as lazy ants. For one thing, there is a rock group called Lazy Ants, but I never heard of them and they don’t really have anything to do with the matter at hand.

There is a species of ant — Polyergus samurai — found mostly in Japan and China whose workers hardly do anything at all.

Once a year or so, these ants raid a nest of other ants and steal their larvae. They haul them back home and stow them away until they mature and then force the captives to do all of the colony’s work.

I don’t know exactly how they do this. I suppose they bite them or shove them around. Maybe they have tiny ant cattle prods.

And an article in the Oct. 15, 2010, issue of Boston Review cited a study by Stanford entomologist Deborah Gordon, who found that: “Contrary to another of our beloved myths about ants told by Aesop, Homer and the writer of Proverbs 6:6, many ants don’t work very hard. In a large harvester-ant colony, about a third of the ants at any time are hanging around doing nothing.”