Communication Is Resilient

a small orange colored ant is surrounded by a honey color environment

Biological Strategy

Ants

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Adapt Behaviors

The environment is constantly changing, and if living systems can’t adapt to these changes, they don’t survive. Environmental changes can be cyclic such as seasons, sudden such as floods or forest fires, or gradual but long-term, such as ecosystems shifting from early to mature stages. These changes require some flexibility in behavioral responses to match the specific conditions. For example, as a fish called the lamprey swims, it constantly faces changes in currents. Skin sensors help it detect those changes and adjust its motion accordingly.

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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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Communication behaviors in Temnothorax ants are resilient because they have evolved as anytime algorithms.

“Tandem runs are a form of recruitment in ants. During a tandem run,
a single leader teaches one follower the route to important resources
such as sources of food or better nest sites. In the present
study, we investigate what tandem leaders and followers do,
in the context of nest emigration, if their partner goes missing.
Our experiments involved removing either leaders or followers
at set points during tandem runs. Former leaders first stand
still and wait for their missing follower but then most often
proceed alone to the new nest site. By contrast, former followers
often first engage in a Brownian search, for almost exactly
the time that their former leader should have waited for
them, and then former followers switch to a superdiffusive search.
In this way, former followers first search their immediate neighbourhood
for their lost leader before becoming ever more wide ranging
so that in the absence of their former leader they can often
find the new nest, re-encounter the old one or meet a new
leader. We also show that followers gain useful information even
from incomplete tandem runs. These observations point to the
important principle that sophisticated communication behaviours may
have evolved as anytime algorithms, i.e. procedures that are
beneficial even if they do not run to completion.” (Franks et al. 2010:1697)