New findings reveal how ants increase their collective sensing power to help them navigate complex terrains.
Ants use their numbers to overcome navigational challenges that are too large and disorienting to be tackled by any single individual, reports a new study in the open-access journal eLife.
The results demonstrate the potential advantages of group living and collective cognition in making certain environments habitable for a species.
“Cooperation is a common means by which animals can increase their cognitive capacity, and we were intrigued as to whether this cooperation allows ants to extend the range of environments in which they can efficiently collect food,” says first author Aviram Gelblum, a postdoctoral fellow in senior author Ofer Feinerman’s lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. “We addressed this question by studying the cooperative transport of ants as they attempted to transport large loads through semi-natural environments.”
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