https://phys.org/news/2025-06-swarm-intelligence-longhorn-crazy-ants.html?utm_source=nw...

"Among the tens of thousands of ant species, incredible "intelligent" behaviors like crop culture, animal husbandry, surgery, "piracy," social distancing, and complex architecture have evolved.

"Yet at first sight, the brain of an ant seems hardly capable of such feats: it is about the size of a poppy seed, with only 0.25m to 1m neurons, compared to 86bn for humans.

"Now, researchers from Israel and Switzerland have shown how "swarm intelligence" resembling advance planning can nevertheless emerge from the concerted operation of many of these tiny brains.

***

"'Here we show for the first time that workers of the longhorn crazy ant can clear obstacles from a path before they become a problem—anticipating where a large food item will need to go and preparing the way in advance. This is the first documented case of ants showing such forward-looking behavior during cooperative transport," said Dr. Ehud Fonio, a research fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel,

***

"'When we first saw ants clearing small obstacles ahead of the moving load we were in awe. It appeared as if these tiny creatures understand the difficulties that lie ahead and try to help their friends in advance," said Dr. Ofer Feinerman, a professor at the Weizmann Institute, and the study's final author.

***

"Like many ant species, crazy ants are known to alert their sisters to the presence of large food items by laying odor trails: running erratically (hence their 'crazy' name), they touch the ground with the tip of their abdomen every 0.2 seconds to deposit a tiny droplet of a pheromone. This pheromone swiftly attracts other workers to the food. But here, the scientists found this pheromone to play a key role in clearing behavior as well.

"Their observations showed that workers were most prone to clear beads that lay approximately 40mm away from food towards the direction of the nest. They moved these beads for up to 50mm before dropping them, away from the route leading back to the nest. The record holder cleared 64 beads in succession.

"Such clearing behavior always occurred when the pellet was whole, but rarely when it was divided into crumbs. This distinction seemed adaptive, as the observations showed that crumbs were always carried home by single workers, who would simply walk around any beads in their path.

"Intact pellets, however, always prompted 'cooperative' transport by multiple workers, who typically remained stalled by a grid of beads until they were cleared.

"That the beads were a real hindrance was also clear from the time that cooperative transport took to pass through a 5cm by 7cm tunnel: this was 18 times longer when the passage was filled with beads than when it was free of obstacles.

"Further observations also revealed that workers didn't need to be in contact with the food to start clearing behavior: they were prompted to do so by pheromones deposited by foragers. A single mark that happened to be near a bead was sufficient to put a worker in 'clearing mode," after which they would actively look for more beads to clear.

"'Taken together, these results imply that our initial impression was wrong: in reality, individual workers don't understand the situation at all. This intelligent behavior happens at the level of the colony, not the individual. Each ant follows simple cues—like fresh scent marks left by others—without needing to understand the bigger picture, yet together they create a smart, goal-directed outcome," concluded Dr. Danielle Mersch, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at the same institute. (my bold)

"'We find this to be even more awe-inspiring than our initial guess," said Feinerman.

"'Humans think ahead by imagining future events in their minds; ants don't do that. But by interacting through chemical signals and shared actions, ant colonies can behave in surprisingly smart ways—achieving tasks that look planned, even though no single ant is doing the planning". (my bold)

Comment: in the past when when I presented ant rafting I said each ant did as programmed, grabbing the closest ant and holding on, thus making a raft, no new thought involved. This shows the same aspect of colony member actions, automatic behavior creating a whole colony reaction. It is just like soccer or football athletic team efforts, but the human players understand the whole concept of what they are a part.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/11/241122130358.htm

"Most ants have two morphologically differentiated adult castes -- queens and workers -- each irreversibly specialized for either reproduction or nonreproductive altruism such as foraging, defense and care of maternal brood. Adult gynes (virgin queens) normally have higher body mass, wings and frontal eyes, as well as enlarged ovaries and a sperm storage organ. In contrast, workers are wingless females with smaller body size and degenerated reproductive tracts, usually without a sperm storage organ.

***

"In most social insects with distinct queen (colony germline) and worker (colony soma) castes the analogous developmental differentiation happens in the larval stage and can still be hormonally reversed.

"However, in some ants colony germlines are also determined earlier, in the embryonic (egg) stage, begging the question whether that makes somatization of workers as irreversible as somatization of animal body cells as development proceeds.

'A new study from the Department of Biology at the University of Copenhagen, funded by a Villum Investigator Grant,finds that caste development is remarkably reversible in pharaoh ants, Monomorium pharaonis, a species where caste determination happens in the eggs stage.

***

"'We found that hormone-treated worker ants developed many gyne-like physical characteristics, such as increased body length, three extra frontal eyes, wings and flight muscles, gyne-like brains; they even developed the gyne-specific sperm storage organ that workers of this species never have."

"However, unlike naturally developed gynes, JH-treated workers never developed ovaries, the reproductive organ that ultimately sets gynes apart from workers, show that the caste-specific JH-sensitivity window does not overlap with the egg-stage.

"The study also sheds new light on how shifts in developmental-sensitivity for growth hormone may have played a role in the emergence of new castes in other ants, such as soldiers (modified workers) or permanently wingless gynes.

"'Such novel castes often originate as mosaic phenotypes that recombine gyne- and worker traits, which may become permanent when natural selection rewards a subsequent shift in JH-sensitivity window," says Guojie Zhang, corresponding author of the study."

Comment: I could just as well reproduced this article under the biochemical controls thread. It is amazing the larva can be sent in any phenotypical direction.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ants-change-nest-architecture-pathogen

"If an infection takes hold in an ants’ nest, it could spell disaster for the whole colony. But some worker ants appear to have a workaround for that. When exposed to a pathogen, black garden ants (Lasius niger) tinkered with their nest layout in ways that could slow the spread of disease, a new study suggests.

"Several animals are known to alter their behavior to avoid infections, including humans, guppies and mice. But these are the first nonhuman animals shown to actively alter their surroundings in response to infections, researchers report September 2...

***

"Ant colonies exposed to the pathogen dug nests faster and initially made more tunnels than healthy colonies, and after six days, had made several structural modifications, including spacing entrances 0.62 centimeters farther apart on average. The exposed colonies also placed chambers — which house colony resources such as queens, their brood and food — in less central locations. And ants infected with the fungus spent more time at the surface than their coworkers, which the study suggests is probably a form of self-isolation.

"The team then used spatial network analysis and disease transmission simulations to see if the changes would have any noticeable impact on the way disease would spread in the nests. Taking the designs crafted by the exposed and unexposed colonies, the team simulated what would happen if a pathogen was introduced. Ant colonies in the disease-resistant redesigns would have a significantly lower fungal load — and fewer lethal doses — than those in nests built without any previous exposure to disease, the team found.

"The findings are fascinating, though not surprising, says Sebastian Stockmaier, a behavioral disease ecologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Social insects like ants, bees and termites have evolved a range of colony-level defenses to effectively manage diseases, he says, and large-scale outbreaks are rare.

"Group living is generally thought to increase the risk of disease, and this threat is particularly pronounced in social insects because of their low genetic diversity and frequent social interactions, factors which help disease to spread. Because of this, when faced with disease, “their strategies are typically targeted at protecting the group as a whole, rather than focusing on the individual,” says Stockmaier. (my bold)

Comment: note my bold. Can ants recognize that concept of group protection? I doubt it and feel they were instructed by design.

https://www.science.org/content/article/early-ants-antennae-may-have-let-them-talk-usin...

"The antennae sprouting from ants’ heads aren’t just for show. The wiggly appendages sweep the air to detect pheromones that raise alarms, lay trails, and help the insects navigate their social lives. But although scientists think ants have always been social, they haven’t been able to say whether early ants used pheromones the way today’s ants do.

"Now, researchers have identified antennae in ancient ants entombed in amber that have the same microscopic, hairlike structures modern ants use to pick up chemical cues, the scientists report today in Science Advances. Not all experts are convinced this means Cretaceous ants, too, chatted via pheromones. But if they did, it could help scientists determine whether that ability helped the insects take over the world.

"Scientists have uncovered groups of individuals preserved next to each other in amber, for example. They’ve also discovered fossils of queens and workers from the same species dating back 99 million years, indicating a caste structure was already in place back then.

***

"The amber was dated to roughly 100 million years ago. That’s nearly as old as ants themselves; the earliest evidence of the insects appears in the fossil records of France and Myanmar between 100 million and 105 million years ago.

***

"Taken together, the researchers say, the findings imply that the earliest ants used their antennae to sense each other’s pheromones in a similar fashion as modern ants. Compared with earlier work, LaPolla says, “this is a more compelling bit of evidence that sociality was very much a feature of early ants.”

“'We [were already] quite confident that the earliest ants were social,” says Phil Barden, an evolutionary biologist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. “Now we can try to get our heads around how much chemical communication there was, and how similar it was to what we have today.”

***

"Still, Barden and LaPolla say the study provides the best evidence yet that early ants may have communicated via chemical signals."

Comment: the rule is most species appear fully equipped for survival. These findings do not surprise me. Ants are amazing survivors all over the world. The entry today on intelligence would say they have evolved instincts for survival.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2423685-ant-queens-have-good-reasons-for-eating-th...

"When black garden ant queens notice their young are sick, they eat them before the illness spreads to the rest of the nest.

"A cannibal queen may not win any “mother of the year” awards, but the strategy could be an effective way to protect her kingdom, research suggests. The findings provide insights into the evolution of “filial cannibalism”, the practice of parents consuming their offspring.

"Ants and other colony-dwelling social insects can thwart the spread of diseases by having workers self-isolate when sick or by removing infected nestmates. These “social immunity” duties are well known, write Flynn Bizzell and Christopher Pull at the University of Oxford. But ant queens start their colonies alone, so how do they defend against disease as they establish and grow a nest?

***

"The queens ate 92 per cent of their sick young, but only 6 per cent of the uninfected larvae, showing they could detect the infection and intervene. Failing to catch the infection could have disastrous consequences. When the team exposed colonies to very infectious larval cadavers sprouting with spore-producing fungi, all the broods died. And only 20 percent of the queens survived, even after they sprayed the corpses with acidic, antimicrobial venom.

"Despite these risks, the queens that eat their infected larvae seem to avoid harm. The queens may be swallowing their own antimicrobial venom to make their guts hostile to fungal spores, the researchers suggest. They base this conclusion on previous observations of worker ants swallowing venom and the team’s observations of queens grooming their venom gland openings.

“'If the queen gets infected and dies, the colony dies,” says Sebastian Stockmaier at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, since she is the only reproductive individual. So, it makes sense that an evolved strategy for dealing with disease would emphasise the survival of the queen.

"Eating the sick babies yields other benefits too. The researchers found queens that ate their sick young went on to lay 55 per cent more eggs than those that didn’t, suggesting they had recycled those caloric resources. This advantage, plus the removal of disease risk, might illustrate a way filial cannibalism could evolve in some species, the researchers argue.

"Joël Meunier at the University of Tours in France wonders if offspring hatched after their older siblings are eaten have immune systems that better protect against the fungal infection. If so, proving this could reveal “dual benefits” of filial cannibalism, for both mother and offspring."

Comment: another example of social behavior in the ant nest.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230607124035.htm

"In their multidisciplinary study published in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists used garden ants and fungal germs to understand what information ants take into account when performing their individual grooming choices.

"Observation of the ants' behavior and analysis of the spore load -- the amount of fungal spores -- of each colony member over time revealed that ants preferentially target the most infectious nestmate for grooming. Additionally, ants do not groom other ants just after they were groomed themselves. Ants therefore not only assess the contagiousness level of others but are also sensitive to the social feedback they receive on their own infectiousness from the colony. This unique combination of simple rules leads to the fact that the most infectious colony members are groomed by the least infectious colony members, resulting in highly efficient colony-level disease control.

"Social ants are masters in cooperative disease defense, which gives rise to the colony-level protection called "social immunity" -- the collective effort to reduce the risk of disease and transmission throughout the colony. Previous studies have described how colony members care for each other, in particular by cleaning off germs and spores from infected nestmates and spraying them with disinfecting chemicals. But how do they know whom they should groom?

***

"Ants preferentially target the individuals that carry the highest amount of spores, which are the individuals that represent the greatest disease risk for the colony. "Ants typically pick the one with the currently highest spore load, although the spore loads are constantly changing due to the grooming itself," Cremer explains. "This allows the ants to dynamically react to changes in disease threat."

***

"Together, the team unraveled which information the ants make use of in their decisions about when to engage in grooming and whom to target. Boďová explains, "The ants follow a simple 'rule of thumb': When they encounter another ant with lots of spores, they are more likely to groom this ant." This means that the ants do not need to remember the spore load of all colony members but can rely on only the information they gather from contact with the ants around them.

"Yet, the system is not perfect. The ants also sometimes groom the less-infectious individual. But the many small biases towards grooming ants with higher amount of infectious fungi performed by all colony members accumulate to a clear choice and efficient cleaning at the colony level. The ants can react to minimal differences in spore loads but make decisions that are more accurate when the discrepancy is higher.

"'We still do not know how the ants sense the difference in spore load. Maybe the more infectious ants have a stronger fungal scent," Cremer hypothesizes. The group's recent publication suggests that ergosterol -- an essential membrane compound that all fungi have -- might be a possible cue for fungal detection.

"The theoretical approaches also revealed that another important factor is relevant to an ant's grooming activity: the ant's sensitivity to social cues given by their nestmates. Cremer explains it as a social feedback loop that prevents highly infectious individuals from taking care of others and thereby limits the risk of spreading the disease during caregiving. More than just an interesting observation of ant behavior, this publication seeks to understand individual decision-making inside the colony. Cremer summarizes, "By teaming up with our colleagues doing theoretical science, we managed to open the black box of individual decision-making in social immunity and cooperative disease defense.'"

Comment: another amazing study of ant social behavior.

https://phys.org/news/2023-06-ants-specialized-communication-center-social.html

"Now, a study published in the journal Cell on June 14 explores how certain danger-signaling pheromones—the scent markers ants emit to communicate with each other—activate a specific part of the ants' brains and can change the behavior of an entire nest.

"'Humans aren't the only animals with complex societies and communication systems," says lead author Taylor Hart of The Rockefeller University. "Over the course of evolution, ants have evolved extremely complex olfactory systems compared to other insects, which allows them to communicate using many different types of pheromones that can mean different things."

"This research suggests that ants have their own kind of communication center in their brains, similar to humans. This center can interpret alarm pheromones, or "danger signals," from other ants. This section of their brain may be more advanced than that of some other insects such as honeybees, which prior work has suggested instead rely on many different parts of their brain to coordinate in response to a single pheromone.

"'There seems to be a sensory hub in the ant brain that all the panic-inducing alarm pheromones feed into," says corresponding author Daniel Kronauer of The Rockefeller University.

***

"When performing the scans, the researchers noticed that only a small section of the ants' brains lit up in response to danger signals, but the ants still showed immediate and complex behaviors in response. These behaviors were named the "panic response" because they involved actions such as fleeing, evacuating the nest, and transporting their offspring from the nest toward a safer location.

***

"Regardless of the species, ants within a colony divide themselves by caste and role, and ants within different castes and roles have slightly different anatomy. For the purpose of this study, researchers chose clonal raider ants as a species because they are easy to control. They used ants of one sex within one caste and role (female worker ants) to ensure consistency and therefore make it easier to observe widespread patterns. Once researchers have a clearer understanding of the neural differences between castes, sexes, and roles, they may better be able to comprehend exactly how different ant brains process the same signals.

"'We can start to look at how these sensory representations are similar or different between ants," says Hart. Kronauer says, "We're looking at division of labor. Why do individuals that are genetically the same assume different tasks in the colony? How does this division of labor work?'"

Comment: the pheromones are an excellent way to communicate and as previously described individual ants will respond in the same way as other ants, creating a full nest reaction.

DAVID: The information is monkey-see-monkey-do. Ants have eyes and join the others in an activity.

dhw: Which activity, since they are confronted with a choice, and why do they communicate with one another if they have nothing to “say”?

They communicate to understand the activity required.

dhw: […] You could hardly have a more vivid illustration of the manner in which cells and cell communities organize themselves in accordance with whatever is required by the whole structure under varying conditions.

DAVID: The usual appeal for innate intelligence, when the cells are beautifully programmed to act intelligently.

dhw: Are you going back to your God devising programmes 3.8 billion years ago for ants and neurons to change tasks whenever required? How do they know which programme to switch on? Or do you think he does ongoing dabbles when ants and neurons change their tasks?

You still refuse to accept automatic activity from programmed information. Tell your kidneys they do not know what they are doing or why!

DAVID: The discussion about this type of organization in neurons may help us understand how our brain is organized and performs its thought processes in concert with its soul.

dhw: I don’t know if there is a soul, but since the soul gives the instructions, that would be the equivalent of the queen, which our author says does NOT give instructions. It’s a communal process, not a top-down process. So in this case, the intelligent cells organize themselves.

DAVID: Not my theory: the soul has to work with the brain neuronal networks to develop instructions or concepts, the complexity of which depend exactly on the level of complexity of the neuron networks. Do you believe the queen gives minute by minute instructions?

dhw: No. I’m happy to accept the author’s view that ant behaviour is the result of communal interaction. The author’s analogy does not mention a soul, in which case his analogy only refers to the materialist view of neurons interacting in order to produce the results.

DAVID: Or are you simply trying to find intelligence where is doesn't exist? If it looks intelligent, doesn't ever mean it is innately intelligent.

dhw: Yet again you make your 100% judgement of what, in your moments of enlightenment, you acknowledge is a 50/50 chance. If it looks intelligent, maybe it IS intelligent!

Since we look from the outside, the odds of 50/50 apply and each of us can chose a side and one of us is correct. From your fence top, we are not allowed to choose? I have my choice.

dhw: How on earth can anyone possibly know that? Is the author antelepathic? If each decision is made through interaction with other ants, information must have been passed from one to another!

DAVID: The information is monkey-see-monkey-do. Ants have eyes and join the others in an activity.

Which activity, since they are confronted with a choice, and why do they communicate with one another if they have nothing to “say”?

QUOTE: Similar processes are at work in other natural systems without central control. For example, although certain large regions of the brain seem to be involved in particular tasks, at the level of neurons it looks like division of labour is not the rule. The same neurons are involved in different tasks, and the same task can be accomplished by different neurons.(David’s bold)

dhw: […] You could hardly have a more vivid illustration of the manner in which cells and cell communities organize themselves in accordance with whatever is required by the whole structure under varying conditions.

DAVID: The usual appeal for innate intelligence, when the cells are beautifully programmed to act intelligently.

Are you going back to your God devising programmes 3.8 billion years ago for ants and neurons to change tasks whenever required? How do they know which programme to switch on? Or do you think he does ongoing dabbles when ants and neurons change their tasks?

QUOTE: "To envisage how an ant’s task of the moment arises from a pulsing network of brief, meaningless interactions might compel us instead to ponder what really accounts for why each of us has a particular job. (David’s bold)

dhw: If you were to see organisms communicating and interacting and then going on to do a particular job at a particular time, wouldn’t you think there was some connection between the procedures? Once more, how the heck can anyone say the interactions are meaningless, when they lead to intelligent behaviour?

DAVID: As interpreted from outside ant brains. Have you done fMRI's on them???

Have you? And if you had, would you have been able to translate their language?

DAVID: My key thought is simple and direct: if one is looking for intelligence as a source of organized activity, one will find it depending upon one's disposition, at the individual level or at the programmed level, but it will not be both.

dhw: I agree. And since conditions are constantly changing, and ants are known to communicate among one another and then to perform new actions in order to cope with new conditions, I would suggest that their efficient organization is the result of individual intelligences communicating rather than their communicating sweet nothings before some unknown power switches on a 3.8-billion-year old programme for ant problem-solving or, just as unlikely, does a dabble to give them the solutions.

DAVID: The author does not believe your mantras about innate intelligence. See, I have compatriots in thought.

Yes of course you do. I have merely pointed out the absurdity of the author’s assumptions.

DAVID: The discussion about this type of organization in neurons may help us understand how our brain is organized and performs its thought processes in concert with its soul.

dhw: I don’t know if there is a soul, but since the soul gives the instructions, that would be the equivalent of the queen, which our author says does NOT give instructions. It’s a communal process, not a top-down process. So in this case, the intelligent cells organize themselves.

DAVID: Not my theory: the soul has to work with the brain neuronal networks to develop instructions or concepts, the complexity of which depend exactly on the level of complexity of the neuron networks. Do you believe the queen gives minute by minute instructions?

No. I’m happy to accept the author’s view that ant behaviour is the result of communal interaction. The author’s analogy does not mention a soul, in which case his analogy only refers to the materialist view of neurons interacting in order to produce the results.

DAVID: Or are you simply trying to find intelligence where is doesn't exist? If it looks intelligent, doesn't ever mean it is innately intelligent.

Yet again you make your 100% judgement of what, in your moments of enlightenment, you acknowledge is a 50/50 chance. If it looks intelligent, maybe it IS intelligent!

dhw: "The colony is not a monarchy. The queen merely lays the eggs. Like many natural systems without central control, ant societies are in fact organised not by division of labour but by a distributed process, in which an ant’s social role is a response to interactions with other ants. (dhw’s bold) In brief encounters, ants use their antennae to smell one another, or to detect a chemical that another ant has recently deposited. Taken in the aggregate, these simple interactions between ants allow colonies to adjust the numbers performing each task and to respond to the changing world. This social coordination occurs without any individual ant making any assessment of what needs to be done.[/b] (David’s bold)

dhw: How on earth can anyone possibly know that? Is the author antelepathic? If each decision is made through interaction with other ants, information must have been passed from one to another!

The information is monkey-see-monkey-do. Ants have eyes and join the others in an activity.

QUOTE: Similar processes are at work in other natural systems without central control. For example, although certain large regions of the brain seem to be involved in particular tasks, at the level of neurons it looks like division of labour is not the rule. The same neurons are involved in different tasks, and the same task can be accomplished by different neurons.(David’s bold)

dhw: And I would have bolded the same passage, since I have often used the ant analogy for the way the body and brain work. You could hardly have a more vivid illustration of the manner in which cells and cell communities organize themselves in accordance with whatever is required by the whole structure under varying conditions.

The usual appeal for innate intelligence, when the cells are beautifully programmed to act intelligently.

QUOTE: " To envisage how an ant’s task of the moment arises from a pulsing network of brief, meaningless interactions might compel us instead to ponder what really accounts for why each of us has a particular job. (David’s bold)

dhw: If you were to see organisms communicating and interacting and then going on to do a particular job at a particular time, wouldn’t you think there was some connection between the procedures? Once more, how the heck can anyone say the interactions are meaningless, when they lead to intelligent behaviour?

As interpreted from outside ant brains. Have you done fMRI's on them???

DAVID: My key thought is simple and direct: if one is looking for intelligence as a source of organized activity, one will find it depending upon one's disposition, at the individual level or at the programmed level, but it will not be both.

dhw: I agree. And since conditions are constantly changing, and ants are known to communicate among one another and then to perform new actions in order to cope with new conditions, I would suggest that their efficient organization is the result of individual intelligences communicating rather than their communicating sweet nothings before some unknown power switches on a programme.

The author does not believe your mantras about innate intelligence. See, I have compatriots in thought.

DAVID: The discussion about this type of organization in neurons may help us understand how our brain is organized and performs its thought processes in concert with its soul.

dhw: I don’t know if there is a soul, but since the soul gives the instructions, that would be the equivalent of the queen, which our author says does NOT give instructions. It’s a communal process, not a top-down process. So in this case, the intelligent cells organize themselves.

Not my theory: the soul has to work with the brain neuronal networks to develop instructions or concepts, the complexity of which depend exactly on the level of complexity of the neuron networks. Do you believe the queen gives minute by minute instructions? Or are you simply trying to find intelligence where is doesn't exist? If it looks intelligent, doesn't ever mean it is innately intelligent.

The answer is given below in precise detail, though with an extraordinary conclusion which David has bolded.

"The colony is not a monarchy. The queen merely lays the eggs. Like many natural systems without central control, ant societies are in fact organised not by division of labour but by a distributed process, in which an ant’s social role is a response to interactions with other ants. (dhw’s bold) In brief encounters, ants use their antennae to smell one another, or to detect a chemical that another ant has recently deposited. Taken in the aggregate, these simple interactions between ants allow colonies to adjust the numbers performing each task and to respond to the changing world. This social coordination occurs without any individual ant making any assessment of what needs to be done.[/b] (David’s bold)

How on earth can anyone possibly know that? Is the author antelepathic? If each decision is made through interaction with other ants, information must have been passed from one to another!

QUOTE: Similar processes are at work in other natural systems without central control. For example, although certain large regions of the brain seem to be involved in particular tasks, at the level of neurons it looks like division of labour is not the rule. The same neurons are involved in different tasks, and the same task can be accomplished by different neurons.(David’s bold)

And I would have bolded the same passage, since I have often used the ant analogy for the way the body and brain work. You could hardly have a more vivid illustration of the manner in which cells and cell communities organize themselves in accordance with whatever is required by the whole structure under varying conditions.

QUOTE: " To envisage how an ant’s task of the moment arises from a pulsing network of brief, meaningless interactions might compel us instead to ponder what really accounts for why each of us has a particular job. (David’s bold)

If you were to see organisms communicating and interacting and then going on to do a particular job at a particular time, wouldn’t you think there was some connection between the procedures? Once more, how the heck can anyone say the interactions are meaningless, when they lead to intelligent behaviour?

DAVID: My key thought is simple and direct: if one is looking for intelligence as a source of organized activity, one will find it depending upon one's disposition, at the individual level or at the programmed level, but it will not be both.

I agree. And since conditions are constantly changing, and ants are known to communicate among one another and then to perform new actions in order to cope with new conditions, I would suggest that their efficient organization is the result of individual intelligences communicating rather than their communicating sweet nothings before some unknown power switches on a programme.

DAVID: The discussion about this type of organization in neurons may help us understand how our brain is organized and performs its thought processes in concert with its soul.

I don’t know if there is a soul, but since the soul gives the instructions, that would be the equivalent of the queen, which our author says does NOT give instructions. It’s a communal process, not a top-down process. So in this case, the intelligent cells organize themselves.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-ant-societies-point-to-radical-possibilities-for-humans?utm_...

"At least in the short term, a system organised by a distributed process and one organised by division of labour could look the same: the same individuals could do the same task over and over. An ant might do the same task day after day. It might go out to forage, come back to the nest, engage again in the interactions that stimulate it to forage, and spend the night among other ants that recently returned from foraging. The next morning, it is again in a situation in which it is likely to forage, and this could continue day after day. However, in different conditions, the ant might do another task, and so its role is not fixed.

"Distributed processes and division of labour can both be effective, but they don’t function in the same way. For division of labour, specialisation can lead to better work. By contrast, in a distributed process, the fact that individuals are interchangeable makes the whole system more robust and more resilient. If the individual who performs a task gets lost or becomes unfit to do it, another can step in. The individuals don’t have to be all alike, but the differences among them are not large enough to affect the viability of the system.

***

"The term ‘distributed process’ originated in computer science. There, it means that no single unit, such as a router in a data network, knows what all the others are doing and tells them what to do. Instead, interactions between each unit and its local connections add up to the desired outcome. Distributed processes often operate in parallel rather than in series. An assembly line works in series: the handle of the car door must be put on before the door is installed, and the door can’t be installed until the person who puts on the handle has finished. In a parallel process, different steps can be done at the same time. Suppose each worker built a car from beginning to end. Then if one worker takes a little longer to put on the door handle on one car, this will not affect when the next worker can install the door on their car. If all the tasks are relatively simple, parallel processes go much faster than serial ones. This is true of computers, in which the logic gates perform very simple tasks, creating electrical versions of 1s and 0s. Compared with processing in series, parallel processing makes it possible to accomplish far more elaborate operations in a short time.

***

"Ants can show how distributed processes might allow us to adjust to a changing environment; to build nests, decide when to move, or change from working inside the nest to foraging outside. It is becoming clear that the ant colonies’ algorithms are diverse, in interesting ways. Similar processes are at work in other natural systems without central control. For example, although certain large regions of the brain seem to be involved in particular tasks, at the level of neurons it looks like division of labour is not the rule. The same neurons are involved in different tasks, and the same task can be accomplished by different neurons.
(my bold)

***

"So why is the ant colony as a factory of specialised workers such a compelling image? First, it’s familiar: a little city of ants, each carrying out its assigned job, is a miniature version of a human city. It’s comforting to imagine that each ant gets up in the morning, drinks its coffee, grabs its briefcase and goes off to work. To envisage how an ant’s task of the moment arises from a pulsing network of brief, meaningless interactions might compel us instead to ponder what really accounts for why each of us has a particular job. (my bold)

Comment: The short remainder discusses an application to human society. The key points, as I see it, fits what was described in the past. The individual ant reacts to a current situation as he is programmed to do. And whether it is bridge building or foraging, he knows what to do. The author with more research, disagrees with E.O. Wilson as he describes ant colonies. Algorithms, not individual intelligence are found. All the bolds note the lack of individual intelligent decision making. My key thought is simple and direct: if one is looking for intelligence as a source of organized activity, one will find it depending upon one's disposition, at the individual level or at the programmed level, but it will not be both. Can you support your predisposition with fact?

The discussion about this type of organization in neurons may help us understand how our brain is organized and performs its thought processes in concert with its soul.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-ant-societies-point-to-radical-possibilities-for-humans?utm_...

"The ant colony has often served as a metaphor for human order and hierarchy. But real ant society is radical to its core

***

"Ant colonies seem the perfect natural instance of a social system governed by division of labour. All known species of ants – now about 14,000 – live in colonies. An ant colony consists of one or more reproductive females, called ‘queens’, who lay the eggs. All the rest of the ants, the ones you see walking around, are sterile female ‘workers’, daughters of the queen and the males with whom she mated.

***

"We know now that ants do not perform as specialised factory workers. Instead ants switch tasks. An ant’s role changes as it grows older and as changing conditions shift the colony’s needs. An ant that feeds the larvae one week might go out to get food the next. Yet in an ant colony, no one is in charge or tells another what to do. So what determines which ant does which task, and when ants switch roles?

"The colony is not a monarchy. The queen merely lays the eggs. Like many natural systems without central control, ant societies are in fact organised not by division of labour but by a distributed process, in which an ant’s social role is a response to interactions with other ants. In brief encounters, ants use their antennae to smell one another, or to detect a chemical that another ant has recently deposited. Taken in the aggregate, these simple interactions between ants allow colonies to adjust the numbers performing each task and to respond to the changing world. This social coordination occurs without any individual ant making any assessment of what needs to be done. (my bold)

***

"When Wilson introduced the notion of ant colonies organised by the division of labour, he framed it as evidence that natural selection had shaped workers to do the tasks they do best. An ant emerges from a pupa as an adult of a certain size, and stays that size throughout its life. In some species, there are ants of different sizes within a colony. Wilson claimed that task and body type coincide: large ants would be soldiers, smaller ones dedicated to more domestic tasks.

"In fact, the data here are sparse and contradictory. Though the largest ants are often designated as ‘soldiers’, in fights between ant species the smaller species often prevails. A large ant, for example, is helpless if six tiny ones grab each of its legs. In some species in the genus Pheidole, the large-headed ‘soldiers’ show no military inclinations; instead they tend to stay in the nest and use their large jaw muscles to crack seeds. But if there are not enough small ants to go outside and forage, the larger ones will do the same tasks as the smaller ones.

***

"...regardless of size, as ant workers get older, they move from one task to another, switching tasks as circumstances require. But switching tasks, either in stages of life or in the short term, is not consistent with organisation by division of labour. However appealing it might be to imagine ant colonies organised by division of labour, the evidence tells us they are not.

***

"...the collective process of task allocation in ant colonies is based on networks of simple interactions. For example, in harvester ants, colonies regulate foraging activity, adjusting the numbers of ants currently out searching for seeds to the amount of food available. An outgoing forager does not leave the nest until it meets enough returning foragers coming back with food. This creates a simple form of positive feedback: the more food is available, the more quickly foragers find it, and the more quickly they return to the nest, eliciting more foraging.

***

"The system that ant colonies use to organise their work is a distributed process. Like division of labour, distributed processes can take different forms. A distributed process is not the opposite of division of labour – but it’s different in important ways. Primarily, in a distributed process, there is never central control, while in division of labour there might be. A leader can tell one citizen to make candles and another to make shoes. In a distributed process this would happen through local interactions, for example with people who want to buy candles or shoes – creating demand that is filled by an entrepreneur who then meets the demand.

See next entry for continuity. Keep in mind my bold

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191022080738.htm

"Whether they occur on holiday routes or the daily commute, traffic jams affect cars as well as pedestrians. Scientists at the Research Center on Animal Cognition (CNRS/Université Toulouse III -- Paul Sabatier) and the University of Arizona (United States) have demonstrated that ant colonies, however, are spared these problems and circulate easily, even in the event of extremely dense traffic, thus ensuring consistent efficiency in their foraging. These findings appear in the 22 October 2019 edition of eLife.

"Traffic jams are a perfect example of what happens when too many individuals circulate together in the same space. Movements in large ant colonies, however, seem to sidestep this problem. To solve the mystery of how ants manage traffic so wonderfully, researchers conducted 170 filmed experiments to observe ants commuting between their nest and a food source. Tests took into account the width of the path and the number of individuals included in the study (between 400 and 25,600) in order to vary the density -- the number of insects per unit of surface.

"What they saw surprised them: when density increases, ant flows (1) swell and then become constant, whereas human traffic, above a certain density threshold, slows to zero flow and causes a jam (2). Ants, on the other hand, accelerate until a maximum flow or capacity on the path is reached. When traffic becomes too dense and causes too many collisions between ants, they change tactics, preferring to avoid time-consuming collisions instead of continuing to accelerate. Similarly, researchers noted that at excessively high density levels, ants refrain from joining the flow of traffic and wait for it to thin out instead.

"While ant traffic is comparable to pedestrian and vehicle flows in many ways, it is also fundamentally different. Ants, protected by their exoskeleton, are not afraid of collisions and can accelerate where we humans prefer to slow down. In addition, movements in ant colonies share a common goal: foraging, which is carried out effectively regardless of density. Ants seem to avoid the traffic jam trap by continuously adapting their traffic rules to suit local crowding, whereas car traffic follows invariable rules such as stopping at a red light regardless of traffic."

Comment: Human traffic jams are the result of individual driver's decisions. The ants make group decisions as each individual makes the same move in coordination. I suspect a learned instinctual behavior based on standardized individual responses to stimuli, as shown in the bridge building study.

https://aeon.co/ideas/an-ant-colony-has-memories-that-its-individual-members-dont-have?...

"Past events can alter the behaviour of both individual ants and ant colonies. Individual carpenter ants offered a sugar treat remembered its location for a few minutes; they were likely to return to where the food had been. Another species, the Sahara Desert ant, meanders around the barren desert, searching for food. It appears that an ant of this species can remember how far it walked, or how many steps it took, since the last time it was at the nest.

"A red wood ant colony remembers its trail system leading to the same trees, year after year, although no single ant does. In the forests of Europe, they forage in high trees to feed on the excretions of aphids that in turn feed on the tree. Their nests are enormous mounds of pine needles situated in the same place for decades, occupied by many generations of colonies. Each ant tends to take the same trail day after day to the same tree. During the long winter, the ants huddle together under the snow. The Finnish myrmecologist Rainer Rosengren showed that when the ants emerge in the spring, an older ant goes out with a young one along the older ant’s habitual trail. The older ant dies and the younger ant adopts that trail as its own, thus leading the colony to remember, or reproduce, the previous year’s trails.

"Foraging in a harvester ant colony requires some individual ant memory. The ants search for scattered seeds and do not use pheromone signals; if an ant finds a seed, there is no point recruiting others because there are not likely to be other seeds nearby. The foragers travel a trail that can extend up to 20 metres from the nest. Each ant leaves the trail and goes off on its own to search for food. It searches until it finds a seed, then goes back to the trail, maybe using the angle of the sunlight as a guide, to return to the nest, following the stream of outgoing foragers. Once back at the nest, a forager drops off its seed, and is stimulated to leave the nest by the rate at which it meets other foragers returning with food. On its next trip, it leaves the trail at about the same place to search again.

***

"Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next.

***

"It is likely that colony behaviour matures because colony size changes the rates of interaction among ants. In an older, larger colony, each ant has more ants to meet than in a younger, smaller one, and the outcome is a more stable dynamic. Perhaps colonies remember a past disturbance because it shifted the location of ants, leading to new patterns of interaction, which might even reinforce the new behaviour overnight while the colony is inactive."

Comment: Colony memory is passed from an older generation to the younger one. Individual ants show some memory ability.


> dhw: Those are indeed the questions we are struggling to answer. And surprise, surprise, I would suggest that the onboard population controls may be the intelligence of the cell communities. That is present because ant intelligence is what enables ants to work out the best way to run their own society, and the source of that intelligence may or may not be your God.-Spoken from the picket fence, and on target, allowing for my view.

David's Comment: I suspect the colony automatically senses the need to change population dynamics and these chemical changes are also automatic at that point.
> 
> You can also change human physiology and character by injecting chemicals, but in nature there is nobody to inject the ants. They change themselves. Of course you suspect that ants do it automatically. You hate the very idea that small organisms might know what they're doing! -We don't change DNA epigenetically by injections of humans. The point of the article is ant have onboard population controls. Why are they present? Did they invent those? Or were they supplied?