A Strange Resemblance Between Ants and Our Brains

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. research, ant colonies works just like neural networks revealed.

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, ants as neurons act as a whole brainThey acted as a system, working in a way that everything was in harmony. 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 With a rise of 34 degrees Celsius emptied out of the nest together. As the number of colony members increased, so did the temperature threshold that would force them to leave this nest. This level at 200 ant colonies It was 36 degrees Celsius.

Through mathematical modeling, the team found that the ants’ collective sensory threshold is not simply an indication of the individual preferences of each ant. not averagingbetween these two factors. how to balance proved. 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 is that the number of It was also making the job of changing the nest even more difficult.