Teachers Wait for Students to Get Bearings

Biological Strategy

Rock ant

Lonny Lippsett

Image: Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash / CC BY - Creative Commons Attribution alone

Learn

Living systems obtain information from their environment and use it to find mates and resources, and to escape threats. Some reactions to gathered information are instinctual or innate behaviors, not based on previous experiences. But other reactions are based on previous experiences, which means that, at some level, the living system is learning. Learning can involve a living system passing information to another living system, or a living system obtaining information and using it in a feedback loop. That information can include knowledge, experience, behavior, and skills. Learning takes place when information that is new to the recipient is used to modify existing behavior or skills. The making and use of tools by some species of birds and mammals is a learned behavior. If a chimpanzee uses a stick to successfully get ants out of an ant mound and continues to do so, it has learned that behavior. If another chimpanzee observes this technique and replicates it, it has learned from the first chimp.

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Navigate Over Land

Organisms that navigate over land must avoid obstacles and find their way from one point to another. Because land lies at the interface of the ground and air, these organisms have the opportunity to use signals transmitted through both the ground or air, rather than relying on one potential source. To take advantage of this opportunity, these organisms must have strategies attuned to diverse signals, which may travel through multiple media. An example of an organism that navigates over land is a desert ant in Tunisia that senses smells from two different directions at once, forming a “mental map” of its surroundings.

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Insects

Class Insecta (“an insect”): Flies, ants, beetles, cockroaches, fleas, dragonflies

Insects are the most abundant arthropods—they make up 90% of the animals in the phylum. They’re found everywhere on earth except the deep ocean, and scientists estimate there are millions of insects not yet described. Most live on land, but many live in freshwater or saltwater marshes for part of their life cycles. Insects have three distinct body sections: a head, which has specialized mouthparts, a thorax, which has jointed legs, and an abdomen. They have well-developed nervous and sensory systems, and are the only invertebrate that can fly, thanks to their lightweight exoskeletons and small size.

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Running together, teacher ants lead student ants to a food source, allowing them to wander and develop first-hand knowledge of the route.

Introduction

Good teachers take their students by the hand and show them the way. Unless they’re ants. Then they take them by the antenna.

Scientists have shown that veteran and inexperienced rock ants (Temnothorax albipennis) maintain a tactile dialogue in which the former pass on their knowledge and the latter follow their lead. Despite their reputation as tiny, pre-programmed robots, ants actively teach and learn.

The Strategy

The lessons happen in the form of something called “tandem running.” Naïve ants that don’t know where to look for food seek ants that do. But they don’t merely follow the leader. They don’t run after them. The two—teacher and pupil—run together, keeping up a two-way conversation.

The experienced ants aren’t laying down a chemical trail for inexperienced ants to follow. And they aren’t just broadcasting knowledge that inexperienced ants may or may not seize and follow up on.

The “teacher” ants slow down to wait for the inexperienced ones. They pause, while the “student” ants often take big loops—likely to get the lay of the land and identify landmarks to guide their way the next time they seek food on their own. The “teacher” ants proceed only when their students tap their antennae on their teachers’ legs and abdomens to communicate that they are close by and ready to proceed with the lesson. The teacher-pupil pair move in tandem, slowing down when the distance between them grows large and speeding up again when they are only an antenna-length apart.

The behavior satisfies two definitions of teaching. First, it involves two-way dialogue between teacher and pupil. Second, the teacher changes its normal behavior—at a cost to itself—so that the student can learn more quickly.

In experiments, scientists showed that teacher ants can get to food sources four times faster if they aren’t burdened by students. The teacher pays this price in exchange for teaching others how to get food efficiently. The immediate cost to the individual pays off by increasing the fitness of the community as a whole.

Further experiments showed that, after their initial lesson with their teachers, student ants don’t repeat the same meandering path they may have taken during their lesson. They have learned about their surroundings and take speedy and direct routes from their nests to food sources.

The Potential

Teaching and learning is much more complicated than just imitating a more experienced colleague. It’s a continual dialogue, in which teachers present information and then wait for students to contextualize and internalize it before proceeding. Remarkably, though it’s a complex process, you don’t need a big brain to do it. You don’t really need a brain at all. Such models can be a model for digital, distribution, and other networks as well.

Last Updated February 13, 2021

References

“An individual is a teacher if it modifies its behaviour in the presence of a naïve observer, at some initial cost to itself, in order to set an example so that the other individual can learn more quickly. We suggest that teaching also involves bidirectional feedback between teacher and pupil. … Our identification of teaching behaviour in an ant shows that a big brain is not a prerequisite.”

Journal article