Month: September 2022

QUORUM DECISIONS. "When its nest is damaged, a colony of the ant ... skillfully emigrates to the best available new site ... the quorum requirement can help a colony choose the best available site, even when few ants have the opportunity to compare sites directly." https://lnkd.in/dK2Sn4M View in LinkedIn

TANDEM RUNNING. "Certain ants find new nest sites by individuals signaling new sites by a timed running motion, where longer times indicate greater uncertainty. As more ants inspect the candidate sites, a quorum is reached to make the group decision to move, despite not all the ants will have inspected all the sites." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing View in LinkedIn

NEGATIVE CHEMICAL SIGNALS. "The use of negative pheromones has already been reported in social insects: honeybee and bumble-bee foragers, for example, mark recently visited, exhausted flowers with chemicals that repel other foragers until nectar has been replenished." https://lnkd.in/d5UvDeJ View in LinkedIn

TRAVELING SALESMAN PROBLEM: "a person must find the shortest route by which to visit a given number of cities, each exactly once ... For just 15 cities, there are billions of route possibilities." https://scholar.google.es/scholar?q=swarm+cognition+in+insects+and+pheromones&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 View in LinkedIn

ANT SALESMAN. "Envision a colony of such ants, each independently hopping from city to city, favoring nearby locations but otherwise traveling randomly. After completing a tour of all the cities, an ant goes back to the links it used and deposits pheromone. The amount of the chemical is inversely proportional to the overall length of the tour: the shorter the distance, the more pheromone each of the links receives." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

BEST FIT FOR SALESMAN PROBLEM. "It is important to note that this ant-based method is effective for finding short routes but not necessarily the shortest one. Nevertheless, such near-optimal solutions are often more than adequate, particularly because obtaining the best route can require an unwieldy amount of computation." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

CORPSE SORTING BY ANTS. "Workers pile up their colony's dead to clean their nests. If the corpses are randomly distributed at the beginning of the experiment, the workers will form clusters within a few hours ... individual ants pick up and drop corpses as a function of the density of corpses they detect in their neighborhood." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

BROOD SORTING BY ANTS. "The workers of the ant ... sort the colony’s brood systematically. Eggs and microlarvae are placed at the center of an area, the largest larvae at the periphery, and pupae and prepupae in between. One explanation of this behavior is that ants pick up and drop items according to the number of similar surrounding objects." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

DIVISION OF LABOR. "A honeybee colony, individuals specialize in certain tasks, depending on their age. Older bees, for example, tend to be the foragers for the hive. But the allocation of tasks is not rigid: when food is scarce, younger nurse bees will forage, too ... scientists have yet to understand exactly how honeybees regulate their division of labor." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

BEE PHEROMONES. "The needs of a honey bee colony are communicated between bees by pheromones, chemical signals which trigger behavioral responses. Honey bees have a variant of the same foraging gene that controls the onset of foraging behavior. Elevated expression of this gene correlates with increased foraging activity." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics_of_social_behavior View in LinkedIn