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Today I saw an award-winning documentary on the Science Channel called Ants: Nature’s Secret Power. You see, I have a love for ants, not just because Will Wright loves them, but because they’re great examples of emergence and systems principles. They’re also completely decentralized social systems, making them a superorganism with collective intelligence, which is something we should be studying more. Doug Engelbart did. (That is, study collective intelligence. Not ants. But he should have.)

Anyway, we all know ants are cool because they’re one of the few eusocial species on the planet, exhibiting extreme specilization and kin altruism, and how they communicate with chemicals and operate via super simple rules, blah blah blah. But here’s some more examples that I learned from the documentary that just mades ants EVEN COOLER.

They actually herd mealybugs to harvest food. The ants use them to harvest honeydew. In exhange, the ants will protect the mealybugs. What’s more is that they actually pick the mealybugs up and take them to better parts of the plant to produce honeydew. They also seem to respect the mealybugs hierarchy and give their queens special treatmeant–they get to ride on the ants’ heads.

Ant colonies can live in something as small as a large acorn, to huge underground cities. Scientists filled one nest with concrete and dug it up. Not only was it huge, but it was beautiful. It looked like something out of Lord of the Rings.

One of the cool things about these cities is that they have a system to maintain temperature. On the surface they have two types of chimnies: one that would blow hot air out and one that would take in fresh air. Their own air conditioning system! How does it work? They have compost heaps in their cities that will generate enough heat to move the air, making hot air go out and pull cool air in.

Parts of their cities are fungus gardens. They grow these and keep them alive and healthy by producing antibiotics in their bodies to treat incoming vegatation to the gardens.

They also harvest dry tree resin and use the medicinal properties to keep their society healthy.

And they can do all these things without our impressive individual intelligence. They operate by very simple rules. For example, they’re able to achieve very efficient grouping of larva by simply picking one up when it has a scent different from what’s around it, and putting it down when it finds a scent like the larva. This is emergence, people! Complexity through very specially organized simplicity.

Anyway, I guess I’ll sell emergence more some other time. For now, just start studying ants, otay? Start by watching this documentary or playing SimAnt.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 11:12 am and is filed under Social, Abstract, Systems Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.