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“It all results from local interactions between the individuals,” said Garnier, a former student of Theraulaz’s who now studies living ant bridges. They have discovered that three basic guidelines governing when and where ants pick up and drop off their building materials are sufficient to create sophisticated, multilayered structures. Guy Theraulaz, a behavioral biologist at the Research Center on Animal Cognition in Toulouse, France, and collaborators have been studying insect nests for the last 20 years, building more complex and realistic models as their data improved. “Self-organizing mechanisms are present everywhere in nature, from the development of an embryo to the organization of large animal populations,” said Simon Garnier, a biologist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. More broadly, identifying the rules that ants obey could help scientists understand how biologically complex systems emerge - for example, how groups of cells give rise to organs. The organization of insect societies is a marquee example of a complex decentralized system that arises from the interactions of many individuals, he said.Ĭracking these problems could lead to improvements in swarm robotics, large numbers of simple robots working together, as well as self-healing materials and other systems capable of organizing and fixing themselves.
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“People are finally starting to crack the problem of producing these structures, which are either made out of soil or the ants themselves,” said Stephen Pratt, a biologist at Arizona State University. It turns out that ants perform these complex tasks by obeying a few simple rules. But new research combining observations of ant behavior with modern imaging techniques and computational modeling is beginning to reveal the secrets of ant construction. Much of this work has focused on understanding how ants decide where to forage or build their homes. Scientists have been studying the social behavior of ants and other insects for decades, searching for chemical cues and other signals that the insects use to coordinate behavior. How do insects with tiny brains engineer such impressive structures? Some ant species even build living structures out of their bodies: Army ants and fire ants in Central and South America assemble themselves into bridges that smooth their path on foraging expeditions, and certain types of fire ants cluster into makeshift rafts to escape floods. Without a blueprint or a leader, thousands of insects moving specks of dirt create a complex, spongelike structure with parallel levels connected by a network of tunnels. Give a colony of garden ants a week and a pile of dirt, and they’ll transform it into an underground edifice about the height of a skyscraper in an ant-scaled city.