rt by @ultimape

Listen to Ofer Feinerman discuss how ants work together to carry large food items back to the nest in our #podcast https://t.co/e1CMrLsh2L https://t.co/j6ItUH27N5

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/eLife/status/815935906989408260

http://www.weizmann.ac.il/complex/feinerman/

ofer on ants starts at 18 min

for ant if found too big of treat.. invite helpers.. but food won’t fit through route.. (ofer has videoed) you go off the beaten track.. everyone chips in idea.. pay less attention than normal to chem signals that led you to treat..

ofer: team up .. 10-20-30 ..

19 min – ofer: diff behavior.. first ant will trace to nest.. recruit.. then carry together.. first ant.. fast stop and go motion.. from side.. each time stops.. puts down scent mark.. then follow marks back to food.. also used in stage after .. when navigating home.. but then treat in diff way

sounds like rev of everyday life

20 min – ofer: we pinpointed scent marks.. they are guiding where to go next.. then saw.. ants guiding ..often making mistakes.. conflicts between diff scales of org in group.. ants can go thru any narrow passage.. but object can’t.. what works here.. 1\ this new ant trail made of very short markings.. just next step to go.. not the whole distance.. 2\ ants that carry don’t follow it religiously...

sounds like.. need/mech to facil whimsy of 7 bn

22 min – so ants contributing to scent marks ..sometimes right/wrong.. equally don’t follow religiously.. follow right.. sometimes follow wrong.. produces noise/error signal in path taken.. that helps them get back..

ofer: right.. they know how to navigate.. giving very small opinions.. step by step.. listen but partially ignore.. tunes just so can pass thru complex environments..

23 min – ofer: we collab’s w lab in france.. that studies distributed computing.. ie: hurricane turns some road signs.. have to carry dice with you.. each junction throw dice.. 1-5 follow sign.. 6 – random.. this is analogous to what ants are doing..

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@ultimape

@davidmanheim @MarkProffitt makes me wonder: is it just a scaffolding problem in disguise? I’m gonna go read more on how ants build bridges.

https://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S44/84/72G99/index.xml?section=topstories

Ants build ‘living’ bridges with their bodies,

speak volumes about group intelligence (November 2015) by Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications

Without any orders or direction, individuals from the rank and file instinctively stretch across the opening, clinging to one another as their comrades-in-arms swarm across their bodies. .. form “living” bridges across breaks and gaps in the forest floor that allow their famously large raiding swarms to travel efficiently.

The ants use collective intelligence to automatically assemble when they detect congestion along their raiding trail, and disassemble when normal traffic has resumed.

“These ants are performing a collective computation. At the level of the entire colony, they’re saying they can afford this many ants locked up in this bridge, but no more than that,” said co-first author Matthew Lutz, a graduate student in Princeton’s

the ants acted as a unit although each ant only knew its immediate circumstances.

host-life-bits that io dance

“They don’t know how many other ants are in the bridge, or what the overall traffic situation is. They only know about their local connections to others, and the sense of ants moving over their bodies,” Couzin said. “Yet,

they have evolved simple rules that allow them to keep reconfiguring until, collectively, they have made a structure of an appropriate size for the prevailing conditions.

“Finding out how sightless ants can achieve such feats certainly could change the way we think of self-configuring structures in nature — and those made by man,” he said.

host-life-bits that io dance

“The goal wasn’t known ahead of time, but ’emerged’ as the collective continually adapted its solution to the environmental factors,”

indigenous us

she said. “The study really opens your eyes to new ways of thinking about collective power, and has tremendous potential as a way to think about engineering systems that are more adaptive and able to solve complex cost-benefit ratios at the network level just through peer-to-peer interactions.”

“The bridges are something that happen numerous times every day. They’re creating bridges to optimize their traffic flow and maximize their time,” Lutz said

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@hannah_epperson

this kinda reads like a coded #resistance rallying cry to me rn, but it’s also just really cool in its own right sciencenews.org/blog/wild-thin…

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Euvie Ivanova (@euvieivanova) tweeted at 6:12 AM – 22 Mar 2018 :

Nature has many meaningful metaphors for human behaviour.

Exhibit A: Ants lose the pheromone track and start following each other in a circle, until they die of exhaustion.

Replace “pheromone track” with “connection to inner wisdom”. https://t.co/dHhKgS2Xln (http://twitter.com/euvieivanova/status/976793756069519360?s=17)

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WIRED (@WIRED) tweeted at 6:26 AM – 29 May 2018 :
Zombie ants are already bizarre enough. Climate change has made them even more so https://t.co/1lyVEW8Kb7 (http://twitter.com/WIRED/status/1001439560117743616?s=17)

A parasitic fungus, known as Ophiocordyceps, invades an ant’s body, growing through its tissues and soaking up nutrients. Then it somehow orders its host to march out of the nest and up a tree above the colony’s trails. The fungus commands the ant to bite onto the vein of a leaf, then kills the thing and grows as a stalk out of the back of its head, turning it into a showerhead raining spores onto victims down below.

“How in the name of … whoever … does the fungus inside the body know what the difference between the leaf and the twig is?” Hughes asks. It always has both options, yet only ever “chooses” one—the best strategy for its particular surroundings.

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