ArticleeLife2020
Ant collective cognition allows for efficient navigation through disordered environments.
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- The 2025 motile active matter roadmap.Journal of physics. Condensed matter : an Institute of Physics journal · 2025Review
- Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Leaderless consensus decision-making determines cooperative transport direction in weaver ants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Minding the gut: extending embodied cognition and perception to the gut complex.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Evidence of Critical Dynamics in Movements of Bees inside a Hive.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Alignment with neighbours enables escape from dead ends in flocking models.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
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.
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Registered trials
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