Colonies Self-organize

Biological Strategy

Insects

AskNature Team

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Cooperate Within the Same Species

A species is a group of organisms capable of breeding to produce fertile offspring. When individuals within a species undertake activities that benefit one another, that cooperation benefits not just the individuals, but also local and wider populations of that species. Collaborating in activities such as finding food, controlling parasites, and protecting from predators enhances overall survival. To cooperate, there must be enough benefit to an individual, and especially to a population, to justify any risk taken by individuals. Through cooperation, risk is distributed among individuals and the benefits to the community are greater than the sum of the benefits to individuals. An example is birds that gather in flocks, a cooperative activity more beneficial than acting alone. While some birds forage, others watch for predators. When one finds food, others also feed on it. Despite potential short-term competition for an individual that finds food, over the long-term, that same individual benefits when others find different food sources.

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Coordinate by Self-Organization

To create and maintain a healthy community of individuals and ecosystems requires that living systems coordinate their activities. Coordination doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a leader orchestrating what happens. In nature, coordination is usually achieved through self-organization. In a flock of geese flying in a V-formation, for example, there’s no lead goose controlling where all of the others fly. The flock uses this formation because each goose gains energy from air vortices created by the goose in front of it. The lead goose doesn’t gain that benefit, so when it tires, it moves back and another goose takes the front position.

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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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Colonies of social insects self-organize and carry out complex group tasks through many simple individual interactions.

For social insects, teamwork is predominantly self-organized. Coordinated primarily through the interactions of individual colony members, the insects can solve complex problems even though each interaction may be very simple.

To understand the power of self-organization, consider how ants find the shortest distance to a food source simply by laying and following chemical trails. For example, two ants leave their nest in search of food and venture off on separate paths. While walking, they release a trail of pheromones (chemicals) that the other ants in the colony can detect. The ant that takes the shorter route doubles back to the nest more quickly, adding more pheromones on top of those already left on the first passage (away from the nest). This reinforcement of pheromones leaves a higher concentration for other ants to sense, and as a result, other members of the colony detect and follow this more distinct trail of pheromones, as well.

In the same way, some termites, with no supervision, collectively build above-ground mounds that may facilitate gas exchange with their below-ground nests. Although science has yet to fully explain the exact mechanisms through which these mounds are created, several models indicate that termites are more likely to deposit soil particles where other individuals have just placed particles, due to the presence of short-lived pheromones.

Self-organization enables a swarm of social insects to carry out complex tasks through the collective duties of individuals within the colony without being centrally controlled. The collective effort of the whole group is the only means by which the group is able to sustain itself and grow as a community.

This summary was contributed by Stephen Nelson.

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References

Journal article

Social Insect Colonies as Complex Adaptive Systems

Ecosystems | 25/07/2002 | Eric Bonabeau

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Reference

“In essence, we believe that social insects have been so successful–they are almost everywhere in the ecosphere–because of three characteristics:

flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment);

robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks); and

self-organization (activities are neither centrally controlled nor locally supervised).

Business executives relate readily to the first two attributes, but they often balk at the third, which is perhaps the most intriguing. Through self-organization, the behavior of the group emerges from the collective interactions of all the individuals. In fact, a major recurring theme in swarm intelligence (and of complexity science in general) is that even if individuals follow simple rules, the resulting group behavior can be surprisingly complex–and remarkably effective. And, to a large extent, fiexibility and robustness result from self-organization.” (Bonabeau and Meyer 2001:108)

Magazine article

Swarm intelligence: A whole new way to think about business

Harvard Business Review | 01/05/2001 | Bonabeau, E; Meyer, C

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Reference

“Each insect in a colony seems to have its own agenda, and yet the group as a whole appears to be highly organized. Apparently the seamless integration of all individual activities does not require any supervision. In fact, scientist who study the behavior of social insects have found that cooperation at the colony level is largely self-organized: in numerous situations the coordination arises from interactions among individuals. Although these interactions might be simple (one ant merely following the trail left by another), together they can solve difficult problems (finding the shortest route among countless possible paths to a food source). This collective behavior that emerges from a group of social insects has been dubbed ‘swarm intelligence.'” (Bonebeau and Theraulaz 2008:73-74)

Journal article

Swarm Smarts

Scientific American | 01/02/2008 | Bonabeau E; Théraulaz G

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Reference

“…the ants can select the shortest path to the food source because they lay and follow pheromone (chemical) trails…the colony may occasionally get ‘stuck’ on a longer path if by chance the longer path is the first one marked. In using the ‘trail laying-trail following’ metaphor for optimization purposes, computer scientists found it essential to improve the convergence properties of their algorithms by artificially increasing the rate of pheromone evaporation beyond biological plausibility.” (Bonebeau et al. 2000:39)

Journal article