[1780] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
metaphors from the natural world
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Geer)
Thu Oct 30 19:52:47 1997
To: cryptography@c2.net
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 1997 18:07:37 -0500
From: Dan Geer <geer@world.std.com>
As a rule, I look to the natural world for analogies as
it is hard to imagine anything we do is all that novel.
In that spirit, here is a passage from
| Bombardier Beetles and Fever Trees
| A Close-up Look at Chemical Warfare and Signals in Animals and Plants
|
| by William Agosta
| Head of the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry
| The Rockefeller University
|
| Addison Wesley, 1996
Enjoy.
--dan
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p.145, paragraph 3, section "learning from ant pheromones"
Ants provide examples of both public and private messages. One of their
most important private messages concerns food, for a food source is
worth keeping secret from others, including of course other species of
ants. Ideally, an ant colony should conceal its food trails to prevent
other species from following them to its source of food. In fact,
unrelated ants use totally unrelated compounds to guide their own
foragers from the nest to food supplies. Each species marks its trails
with signals that are meaningless to others, so that an ant crossing a
trail left by another ant species typically notices nothing. On the
other hand, a secret signal to mark a dead body is unnecessary. Many
kinds of ants, as well as honey bees, perceive a natural decomposition
product of dead insects as a signal to pick up the corpse and take it
from the nest. If an outsider recognizes this message and moves the
body, no harm is done.
