Try to leave a small piece of bread on the ground, in few hours they will swarm on it appearing from nowhere.
They are one of the smallest animals with a brain capable of extraordinary things when working for is hive and have some interesting behaviours.
Despite the fact that there is a Queen no one has ruling power in an Ants hive and the Queen, well, she is just a procreation machine living for the wellness of the hive.
The thing that strikes me the most about ants is their resemblance to neurons, in fact a single ant is nothing, but with its swarm is capable of incredible actions just as single neuron in the human brain is nothing and can respond only to neurons connected to it, but all of them together can be Albert Einstein.
Speaking of scientists, Deborah Gordon (from Stanford University) has studied ants social structures and unveiled the way their society actually work.
Every ant carries information about food location, colony status, possible danger or other relevant information for the hive, which will be shared via chemical signal to the next ant which will carry those information to the next and so on if some condition are met.
What does this mean? The way ants make decisions can be expressed through a non-deterministic mathematical algorithm!
For instance, if an ant is going outside hunting for food it will decide which path to use based on how frequently it bumps with another ant….and if one of them finds food they will use the same strategy to understand how much of that food is still there using statistical approximations to be as efficient as possible.
You know what else works in the exact same way?
We are used to think about the brain as an organic digital computer, but information is not stored and transmitted in forms of ones and zeros. Information is represented by the brain as statistical approximations, sounds familiar?
The hive behaves just like a huge single organism with each component acting like a firing neuron, with intricate dynamic roads as synapses and the power of its selfless components acting just like every cell in your body which lives a selfless life to keep the whole body alive.
So does this mean ants are actually living neurons of a larger organism made of insects instead of cells?
Probably not... but it’s still a cool concept and a fun fact that shows us the complicated beauty of the world we live in even when looking at something as small as an ant.
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