Lausanne World Pulse – Perspectives Articles – Learning from Ants: Intelligent Swarms in Many Settings
Only male ants (called drones) and breeding females have wings. They do nothing in life except eat until it is time to mate. When it is time to mate, they move outside and fly off. They mate in the air, and the male dies shortly thereafter. The female stores the sperm of the male, which she will use to fertilize future eggs. Then she lands and finds a place to start a new colony. She breaks off her wings (she will never fly again) and begins laying eggs (which she will do every day for the rest of her life). Some queen ants can live up to fifteen years. Depending on the type of ant, a queen can produce up to 1,500 eggs per day every day. Some colonies (such as Fire Ants) can have multiple queens—as many as one hundred. Ants can spread very quickly: a mature colony can produce over four thousand reproductive breeders during the year. Nearly 100,000 queen ants can be produced per acre in heavily populated land.
Ants communicate by means of scent pheromones they leave on the ground as they travel. For example, when an ant finds a food source it will return to the colony, dropping a food scent along the trail. Other ants will follow this trail, dropping their own food scents along the way. This is how ants can rapidly swarm something (like a dead lizard). As more and more ants follow the trail, each dropping a scent, the trail gets stronger and stronger—like a neon sign. Finally, when the ants have carted all the food away, they will stop going and the “scent” will eventually fade. Likewise, if an ant is killed, its crushed body will give off an “alarm scent.” This scent sends nearby ants into a frenzy, ready to respond to whatever invading bug is nearby, while also serving to attract distant ants to the “scene of the battle.”
What wisdom can we learn from an ant, other than the admonition to not be lazy?
With an incredible reproductive rate and simple standards for workers, ant colonies can easily take over an area. Sometimes, individual colonies join together to form huge “super-colonies.” Until 2002, the largest known ant colony was on the Ishikari cost of Hokkaido, Japan: it has 300 million worker ants, one million queens and forty-five thousand interconnected nests in an area measuring about three square kilometers.
In 2002, however, another super-colony was found in Melbourne, Australia, that measured approximately one hundred kilometers (sixty-two miles) wide. These ants originally came from Argentina; there, they were highly aggressive toward each other and their “civil wars” kept their populations low. But when the Argentinian ants migrated to Australia (probably aboard container ships), something changed in their behavior. They stopped fighting with each other and instead began working together. Now they are taking over the Australian environment!
The industry of ants has always been well known. Proverbs 6 says, “Go to the ant, you sluggard. Consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.” Proverbs 30:25 calls ants one of four “extremely wise” creatures: “Ants are creatures of little strength, yet they store up their food in the summer.”
Swarm Intelligence
But ants are ants. They are insects—bugs! Compared to us, they have next to no brains. What wisdom can we learn from an ant, other than the admonition to not be lazy? How can a swarm of unintelligent creatures be intelligent?
In fact, an ant swarm has a collective intelligence that can be highly suited to some forms of problem solving—and their “ways” have an enormous amount of wisdom for us. There is actually a study of this wisdom called “swarm intelligence.” Swarm intelligence is the study of the “collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems.” The term was created in 1989 by scientists. It describes systems—like ant colonies—that are made up of simple agents or creatures that interact with each other and their environment.
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