We continue to learn new information every day about ants, which constitute the most advanced communities of the animal kingdom. A new study, recently published in PNAS, is the kind that will make us fall in love with ants again. The research revealed that ant colonies work just like neural networks.
The team behind this surprising study studied when and how ant colonies evacuate their nests when temperatures get too high. After a while, the team saw that the ants decided to leave the nest as a group. In other words, the ants acted as a system, working in a way that everything worked in harmony, just as neurons acted as a whole brain. They calculated the benefits and cost of their decision.
As their number increased, so did their temperature threshold:
The subject setup used in the study included a temperature-controlled nest, a monitoring camera, and ants marked with dots. The colony, consisting of 36 worker ants and 18 larvae, emptied from the nest as the temperature rose 34 degrees Celsius. As the number of colony members increased, so did the temperature threshold that would force them to leave this nest. In 200 ant colonies, this level was 36 degrees Celsius.
Through mathematical modeling, the team proved how the ants’ collective sensory threshold is based on the balance between these two factors, not simply averaging the individual preferences of each ant. But the research also raised a question mark that needed to be resolved later on: Why did the temperature threshold increase in individual non-decisive ants as the number of colony members increased? Why did the ants want to stay in the nest as the number increased? The only hypothesis at the moment was that the higher the number, the more difficult the job of changing the nest.
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