May 28, 2014

In a recent paper in PNAS, Chaos-order transition in foraging behavior of ants, SFI External Professor Hans Schellnhuber and collaborators model optimal ant colony foraging strategies and suggest that individual ants’ knowledge and experience play a role in foraging success of the entire colony.

Their model of social animals’ hunting, homing, and path building behaviors suggests that ants ages, levels of experience, and physical abilities play roles in individual success or failure. Their study finds that when younger ants learn from experienced older ants, which presumably incorporate familiarity with nest location into their homing abilities, the colony achieves greater foraging success collectively.

Schellnhuber suggests that for social animals, “foraging behavior should not be characterized by random walking, but rather by deterministic walking in random environments.”

Read the paper in PNAS (May 26, 2014)