Ants travelling on an experimentally designed bridge. Image credit: Emmanuel Perrin and Audrey Dussutour, CNRS photothèque (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Humans and ants are among the few species that engage in two-way traffic. Maintaining a smooth and efficient traffic flow while avoiding collisions is challenging for humans. Yet ants seem to be masters of traffic management. They can efficiently move back and forth between their nests and food without overtaking or passing each other, forming a steady stream of traffic. Few studies have looked at how ants maintain such a smooth flow even as the number of ants on a path increases.
Now, Poissonnier, Motsch et al. have designed an experiment to investigate whether ants can maintain their steady stream of traffic when their path to food gets more crowded. This involved manipulating the density of ants using a combination of different sized colonies (ranging from 400 to 25,600 Argentine ants) and changing the width of the bridge connecting the ants to their source of food. The experiment was repeated 170 times, and data was collected on traffic flow, speed of the ants, and number of collisions.
For pedestrians and car traffic, the flow of movement will slow down if occupancy levels reach over 40%. Whereas in ants, the flow of traffic showed no signs of declining even when bridge occupancy reached 80%. The experiments revealed that ants do this by adjusting their behavior to their circumstances. They speed up at intermediate densities, avoid collisions at large densities, and avoid entering overcrowded trails.
Studying ant traffic management has been a source of inspiration for scientists working with large groups of interacting particles in many fields. This includes molecular biology, statistical physics, and telecommunications. It may also have relevance for managing human traffic, particularly as scientists develop autonomous vehicles that might be programmed to work together cooperatively as ants do.
