New research from the Rockefeller University suggests that colonies of ants make decisions collectively, with outcomes dependent both on the magnitude of the stressor requiring a decision as well as the size of the ant group. The findings suggest that ants combine sensory information about their environment with parameters of their colony to arrive at a group response.
Most interestingly of all, this process is similar to the way neural networks make decisions.
“We pioneered an approach to understand the ant colony as a cognitive-like system that perceives inputs and then translates them into behavioral outputs,” says Daniel Kronauer, head of the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior at Rockefeller, and lead author of the paper. “This is one of the first steps toward really understanding how insect societies engage in collective computation.”
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In the future, the group plans to further refine their theoretical model for the decision-making process in the ant colony by introducing more parameters into the experiment and seeing how the insects respond. For example, they plan to tamper with the pheromone levels in the enclosure, or to create genetically-modified ants whose ability to detect temperatures varies from the norm.
