Anternet

Jamie Merrill reports in the Independent about recent research on ant behavior:

“research shows that ants don’t just flourish because they work hard and will slavishly sacrifice themselves for the collective. Their success is also due to their group ability to process information ‘far more efficiently than Google’ in the daily search for food, according to scientists.

‘A major behavioural mathematics study, which could also have ramifications for how we understand human behaviour on the internet, used complex computer modelling to reveal how ants bring order to chaos by creating ‘highly complex networks’ to govern their actions.

“It found that not only are ants ‘surprisingly efficient,’ but they are able to deploy ingenious navigation strategies to divide themselves between ‘scout’ and ‘gathering’ ants during ‘complex feed-search movements.’”