11,000 ant species…so much we can learn:
Many dynamical networks, such as the ones that produce the collective behavior of social insects, operate without any central control, instead arising from local interactions among individuals. A well-studied example is the formation of recruitment trails in ant colonies, but many ant species do not use pheromone trails… The fundamental question about the collective behavior of animals is how the actions of individuals add up to the dynamic behavior we observe. In many systems, including animal groups, distributed networks are regulated using feedback based on local interactions. Continued at PLOS – Computational Biology