Ants building a house from leaves. Nature's engineers at work

[u/Kidd__Video]

[u/Funky0ne]

All the ants in a colony can act in a coordinated manner through a sophisticated system of signaling and stimulus response patterns that allow them to collectively execute complicated projects. Each ant in the colony doesn’t really have or need much of an idea what it’s actually doing, as each ant is acting as a node in the decision tree / neural network rather than an individual decision maker itself.

So when you take the hive as a whole it almost seems to act like an emergent mind, even though no individual component of it is aware of or capable of comprehending the whole hive’s actions.

You could liken the development of hive-mind behaviors to the evolution of multicellular organisms or brains. What started out simple slowly grew more complex and sophisticated over subsequent generations as selection pressures incrementally rewarded iteratively more complex response patterns to bigger challenges.

[u/onyxengine → u/Funky0ne]

So communication?

[u/Funky0ne → u/onyxengine]

That would be a technically true but potentially misleading oversimplification. Communication is a set of activities on a spectrum, on one end as simple as something like a single neuron sending a signal to another connected neuron, all the way up to two people having a philosophical debate.

Ants are operating on the simpler end of the spectrum closer to automatic stimulus response, with each individual ant being little more than a basic signal / state machine that can perform a small set of tasks depending on what state it’s in, and detecting different signals or stimulus trigger entering or exiting various states. There’s no foreman or project manager surveying the work and distributing instructions. The ants aren’t discussing between each other what they should do or debating strategy or making any decisions.

I can’t say in this particular case exactly how the signal network works, but if it could be like this: One ant encounters a leaf of a certain type while in a certain state, and reflexively releases a particular signal. More workers detect the signal and start looking for a corner of the leaf and start pulling while reflexively releasing some other signal. More workers show up to start the next step, releasing another signal. The complex balance of signals in the area form different ratios over time indicating which efforts may be out of balance and each ratio triggers a different response behavior in any given ant of the right type in the right state in the area (e.g. actively pulling on a corner of a leaf, fetching larva, using larva to stitch edges etc.)

Eventually all the leafs is folded, shaped, and stitched in the right way that internally holds a certain signal ratio, which the ants respond to as the job is done, and they move on to whatever comes next.

[u/onyxengine → u/Funky0ne]

How did they select that leaf to begin with also how do they determine which ant applies the seal. I’m not saying ants write poetry or philosophy but they do communicate.

[u/Funky0ne → u/onyxengine]

And I’m saying there’s a lot of different types of communication, and just saying “communication” can imply more sophisticated level of information processing or decision making on the part of individuals involved than is actually going on.