In addition , ants are able to work together without a leader giving them direction. Despite their name,queen ants are not leaders . Instead, ants find out what they need to do from their sense of smell .Research on harvester ants by Deborah Gordon and Michael Greene in 2010 showed that when harvester ants pass each other , they pick up a chemical smell which tells them what the other ants doing . The number of ants they pass doing a particular job determines what they need to do. It is a form of communication,but unlike human communication it has no content;it is just base on numbers. if you are working in an office and you receive an email instructing you to do something , you know what to do because of the content of the email. If humans were like ants, it wouldn't matter what the media said the important thing would be the number of emails.