Emergence & Adaptive Dynamics of Collective Intelligence
Ant colonies exhibit a range of dynamic self-organized behaviors, such as nest building, migration, and the formation of living bridges or rafts. These behaviors represent extended phenotypes that result from the collective actions of individual ants. By studying the relationship between individual actions, emergent collective traits, and the ecological context, I will advance our understanding of the proximate mechanisms that enable the evolution of complex behaviors in ants and other social insects.
Self-assembly of pontoon bridging
In social insects, collective structures often arise in response to environmental challenges like gaps in a foraging path, prompting ants to form bridges. We demonstrate that fire ants can self-assemble functional structures even in a uniform environment. In laboratory experiments with 8000-ant subcolonies, ants detected food in the center of a water-filled dish and formed a floating pontoon bridge of about 500 ants to reach it. Despite multiple initial proto-bridges, only one fully formed as others dissipated, with no environmental heterogeneity guiding bridge placement. Our agent-based model suggests this behavior emerges from individual ants responding to local cues, such as food scent. In heterogeneous environments, where the distance to food varies, ants formed multiple bridges, confirming the model’s predictions. This study reveals how ants can coordinate complex self-assemblages using only local information, without relying on environmental asymmetry.
Manuscript in prep for PNAS
Collective learning in pavement construction
Manuscript in revision
As early as 1911, Wheeler documented in his classic monograph that many ant species deposit debris onto noxious substrates on their foraging paths to facilitate movement, yet it remains unclear whether ants can adaptively and collectively refine such tool-use behavior as a group. To test this, we designed an assay in which workers of Solenopsis invicta, a globally widespread ant with robust paving response, were required to cross a viscous barrier to reach a food source, prompting them to cover the barrier using nearby substrate. We presented test colonies with a freshly assembled circular “paving arena” for up to five 24-hour trials, each separated by a one-week interval.
To our best knowledge, our study is the first to demonstrate collective learning in social insect colonies through a strategic trade-off between task completion time and functional efficiency: gradually paving straighter, narrower routes with less material. Further, we found that such learning resulted from interaction with the material (glitter) but not the actual paving task experience.
