Ants
If and when you’re looking for it, you will never see an ant stuck in traffic.
Iain Couzin, a mathematical biologist at the University of Oxford, has spent years studying army ants and other swarming animals — like birds, fish, and locusts — that seem controlled by a single brain. Using video analysis to track the movement of ants on trails (and computer models of individual ants following a trail of pheromones), Couzin and colleagues have identified a few simple rules of ant group behavior — and they’ve laid the foundation for a computer simulation of army-ant highways.
These simulations show that ants have evolved a three-lane, two-way traffic system: As many as 200,000 ants a day pour out of their nest in search of food, splitting into two groups to form two outgoing lanes; they return in a single center lane, sometimes carrying more than 30,000 edible grasshoppers or other insects.
If and when you’re looking for it, you will never see an ant stuck in traffic.
Iain Couzin, a mathematical biologist at the University of Oxford, has spent years studying army ants and other swarming animals — like birds, fish, and locusts — that seem controlled by a single brain. Using video analysis to track the movement of ants on trails (and computer models of individual ants following a trail of pheromones), Couzin and colleagues have identified a few simple rules of ant group behavior — and they’ve laid the foundation for a computer simulation of army-ant highways.
These simulations show that ants have evolved a three-lane, two-way traffic system: As many as 200,000 ants a day pour out of their nest in search of food, splitting into two groups to form two outgoing lanes; they return in a single center lane, sometimes carrying more than 30,000 edible grasshoppers or other insects.