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Listening to others is good. Thinking for yourself might be better. But ants do even better than that: They do both.
Ants live in complex societies and must make important decisions together in order to survive. Many ants communicate with each other by laying chemical trails on the ground in order to tell other ants where to go. But ants also have a very good memory and might for example remember that the food was somewhere else. With some ants saying “you should go this way” and others thinking “I should go that way”, one might expect chaos. But the ants know better.
A team of researchers at the University of Regensburg and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studied how individual ants learn the locations of food sources. The researchers then used what they learned to model the behaviour of whole colonies. By shutting off the ability of ants to either communicate or remember, they could see how communication and individual decision making work together.
Modelled ant colonies which either could not remember or could not communicate collected little food. But colonies which could do both were very successful. “I think of this like a composite material, like fibre glass”, said lead author Dr. Tomer Czaczkes. “This material has the strength of hard plastic and the flexibility of fibres. Well, these ant colonies make composite decisions, and get the benefit of making their own decisions and listening to others.”
Being able to communicate allows ants to use new food sources quickly, but having a memory allows individual ants to specialise on their favourite food sources, so different ants do not interfere with each other. This allows all available resources to be used more fully. The authors think that this insight could lead to technological innovations. Ant colony organisation is the inspiration for how we humans route traffic on roads or data over the internet. “Exploiting such composite decision making could allow us to channel traffic or data more efficiently. We could move more traffic or data without having to build more roads or data cables”, said Dr. Czaczkes.
Information for Editors
Manuscript title: Composite Collective Decision Making
Authors: Czaczkes, T.J., Czaczkes, B., Iglhaut, C. & Heinze, J,
Institutes: University of Regensburg, Germany, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Contact: tomer.czaczkes@ur.de
Publication: Proceedings of the Royal Society B
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.2723
Publication date: Wednesday 27th May, 2015 08:01 BST
Criteria of this press release:
Journalists
Biology, Zoology / agricultural and forest sciences
transregional, national
Research results, Scientific Publications
English
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