An ant colony grown point by point. The queen gives the orders; the workers carry the market home, together.
“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.”— PROVERBS 6:6
The colony starts sealed in the royal chamber: a queen, her soldiers and a few workers. They dig a thin shaft to the surface; fruits that fall before the breakthrough wait on the ground. Every fruit feeds the queen's laying, the colony grows, and whenever the nest gets crowded the queen orders new tunnels pushed out in every direction: nurseries, barracks, quarters, granaries, cross-galleries, new entrances. The market literally digs the nest.
A fruit is never cut, and it always goes to the queen. As many workers as its weight demands grip it all around and carry it whole down the royal shaft. If it is wider than the shaft, the carriers wait while excavators widen the shaft to fit: a watermelon rebuilds the main road. The queen and her brood eat it there.
One colony runs on the server and every visitor watches the same ants. These buttons and the speed control act on that shared colony, so they only work from the operator's machine.
No ant understands the plan. The colony does.
One ant is a small machine: a brain of roughly a quarter of a million neurons, a few dozen behaviours, a nose for chemicals. A colony of them farms fungus, builds air-conditioned cities, runs supply lines and finds the shortest road to food. Nobody is in charge of any of it.
Biologists call it a superorganism: workers are its cells, pheromone trails its nerves, the nest its body. It is the third road to superintelligence in Bostrom's book, after speed and quality: collective intelligence.
When food is too heavy for one ant, several grip it and carry it as a team. In longhorn crazy ants, carrier groups are steered by a few freshly arrived workers who know the way home, and the group amplifies their pull (Gelblum and colleagues, Nature Communications, 2015). Heavier load, more carriers.
Pierre-Paul Grassé, studying termites, named it: insects coordinate by changing their environment. An ant that finds food lays a scent trail home; others follow and add to it. The trail is the colony's working memory.
Give Argentine ants a short and a long bridge to food. The short one gets reinforced first and the colony converges on it (Goss, Deneubourg and colleagues, 1989). Marco Dorigo turned it into Ant Colony Optimization in 1992.
An ant brain holds on the order of a quarter of a million neurons, many in the paired mushroom bodies that tie smells and landmarks to memory. Switch to NERVOUS SYSTEM to see the queen's.
She flies once, mates once, sheds her wings and stores the sperm for decades: a black garden ant queen lived close to 29 years in a lab. She does not command; her pheromones signal that she is alive and fertile.
Many ant species see red light poorly, so formicaria are often watched under red light: the observer can see, the colony behaves as if in the dark. CAM 01 films FX-01 that way.
About twenty quadrillion ants are alive at any moment, more carbon than all wild birds and mammals together (Schultheiss and colleagues, PNAS, 2022).
| What FORMICA shows | Status |
|---|---|
| Pheromone trails recruit foragers | REAL |
| Group transport of heavy food | REAL |
| Nurses carry eggs to the brood chamber | REAL |
| A midden (refuse chamber) | REAL |
| Mushroom bodies, ventral nerve cord, ovaries | REAL |
| Tunnels drawn as axons | METAPHOR |
| The queen gives orders | FICTIONhere she does |
| Tokens burned in the midden | FICTION |
Grassé 1959 · Goss, Aron, Deneubourg & Pasteels 1989 · Dorigo 1992 · Wheeler 1911 · Hölldobler & Wilson 2009 · Gelblum et al. 2015 · Schultheiss et al. 2022