Ant collective cognition allows for efficient navigation through disordered environments
- Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
- Ort Braude College, Israel
- CNRS and University of Paris, France
Abstract
The cognitive abilities of biological organisms only make sense in the context of their environment. Here, we study longhorn crazy ant collective navigation skills within the context of a semi-natural, randomized environment. Mapping this biological setting into the 'Ant-in-a-Labyrinth' framework which studies physical transport through disordered media allows us to formulate precise links between the statistics of environmental challenges and the ants' collective navigation abilities. We show that, in this environment, the ants use their numbers to collectively extend their sensing range. Although this extension is moderate, it nevertheless allows for extremely fast traversal times that overshadow known physical solutions to the 'Ant-in-a-Labyrinth' problem. To explain this large payoff, we use percolation theory and prove that whenever the labyrinth is solvable, a logarithmically small sensing range suffices for extreme speedup. Overall, our work demonstrates the potential advantages of group living and collective cognition in increasing a species' habitable range.
Data availability
Full raw data of both the labyrinths and the ants collective trajectories through these labyrinths were uploaded with this submission.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (770964)
- Ofer Feinerman
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (648032)
- Amos Korman
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Gelblum et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Ant collective cognition allows for efficient navigation through disordered environments
eLife 9:e55195.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.55195
