Looking at how ants search for food could help researchers gain insight into human behaviors such as internet browsing.
"Ants have a nest so they need something like a strategy to bring home the food they find," lead-author Lixiang Li who is affiliated both to the Information Security Center, State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, at the Beijing University of Posts and Communications, and to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said in a news release. "We argue that this is a factor, largely underestimated so far, that actually determines their behavior."
Researchers put data on ant foraging behavior into computer algorithms and equations. The research assumes ant foraging takes place in three stages. First a scout ant goes in search of food, if they find something they bring a small piece back to the nest leaving a scent trail along the way.
Other ants will follow the trail and bring back bits of the food, but their "orchestration" is weak because there are few pheromones on the trail. The ants will take a number of different trails to the food to optimize the path.The scent is stronger the shorter the path is, so the ants tend to choose the shortest trails.
The study also revealed more seasoned ants are better foragers than younger ones, something that has never been looked at before.
"While the single ant is certainly not smart, the collective acts in a way that I'm tempted to call intelligent," co-author Jürgen Kurths who leads PIK's research domain Transdisciplinary Concepts and Methods, said in the news release. "The principle of [self-organization] is known from for instance fish swarms, but it is the homing which makes the ants so interesting."
"The ants collectively form a highly efficient complex network," Kurths said. "And this is something we find in many natural and social systems."
