Something new from the world of science:

In a research paper recently published online in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report that all ants, both living and dead, have the "death chemicals" continually, but live ants have them along with other chemicals associated with life — the "life chemicals." When an ant dies, its life chemicals dissipate or are degraded, and only the death chemicals remain.

"It's because the dead ant no longer smells like a living ant that it gets carried to the graveyard, not because its body releases new, unique chemicals after death," said Dong-Hwan Choe, the lead author of the research paper and a graduate student working towards his doctoral degree with Michael Rust, a professor of entomology at UCR.

"There is no mistaking that it is the dissipation of chemical signals associated with life rather than the increase of a decomposition product 'death cue' that triggers necrophoric behavior by Argentine ants," he said.

The passage from the recent science report echoes a passage from a book written nearly 200 years ago, Science of Logic:

When we say of things that they are finite, we understand thereby that they not only have determinateness, that their quality is not only a reality and an intrinsic determination, that finite things are not merely limited—as such they still have determinate being outside the limit—but that, on the contrary, nonbeing constitutes their nature and being....

...[T]he truth of this being is their end. The finite not only alters, like something in general, but it ceases to be; and its ceasing to be is not merely a possibility, so that it could be without ceasing to be, but the being as such of finite things is to have the germ of decease as their being-within-self: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.

Hegel's doctrine of being is identical with the mechanism for necrophoresis in Argentine ants.