[RoyalHenOil]

The heart of the science profession is the scientific method (just like the heart of the firefighting profession is fighting fires), but there are many other activities that scientists and firefighters perform that are not science or firefighting, such as writing grant proposals or doing maintenance on firetrucks.

Ants (today) are classified differently from scientists and firefighters. They are not defined based on a specific thing they do, like "anting"; rather, they are defined based on what they are, and their behavior is irrelevant to their classification.

Historically, animal categories were defined much more like professions. A fish was something that primarily swims; a bird was something that primarily flies; a worm was something that primarily slithers; a beast (the category that ants fell into) was something that primarily crawls. Even concepts like "animal" and "plant" were defined this way: animals are animated, while plants are planted in place. There was a lot of debate on how to categorize lifeforms that exhibited less-than-crytal-clear modes of locomotion, just as there is debate today on whether a given person is actually a scientist or not (do they do real science or pseudoscience? do they do a lot of science or is too little science for it to count? etc.).

This, of course, is radically different from the way we classify biological lifeforms now, although there are a few odd historical holdovers (like "fish", which is a catch-all term for aquatic vertebrates without terrestrial ancestors, even though some of them are more closely related to land animals than they are to other fish).