Ants use a highly systematic process to scour the ground in the search for food. The system employed by the insects is even more efficient than search algorithms used by Google Maps, according to one researcher.
Each ant moves in a near-random pattern, but the tiny animals use communication to guide the collective effort.
German researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research collected as much information as they could about foraging behavior of ants. They then fed this data to powerful computers, searching for underlying patterns that could reveal the reasons behind these actions.
Researchers from the Beijing University of Posts and Communications found ants divide themselves into two groups when searching for sustenance -- scouts and gatherers. When ants performing scouting activities find food sources, they lay out a trail of pheromones to guide the gatherers to the cache. As trails become more common, the efficiency of the search rises over time.
Highly efficient search patterns, guided by the pheromone trails, save the colony both time and energy.
As ants grow older, they gain knowledge of the immediate territory surrounding their nest. Over time, they can pass that information on to other members of the colony, making the collective search better-managed than today's best human designers can accomplish in online search algorithms.
"That transition between chaos and order is an important mechanism and I'd go as far as to say that the learning strategy involved in that is more accurate and complex than a Google search," Jurgen Kurths of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research told The Independent.
Older ants have previously been observed leading scouting parties in dangerous conditions and locations. Biologists previously believed this was done because the older ants were the most expendable. This new research suggests mature ants lead the search parties, like experienced human construction supervisors, to train younger ants.
"We found that an effective foraging of ants mainly depends on their nest as well as their physical abilities and knowledge due to experience... [T]he foraging behavior of ants is not represented by random, but rather by deterministic walks... Ants use their intelligence and experience to navigate," Kurths wrote in an article, detailing his team's study.
Self-organization brings order to chaos in a diverse number of places, including chemical, electronic and biological systems. Crystallization, convection of heat in boiling liquids, and the behavior of neural networks are all subject to the rules of self-organization.
Investigation of the foraging behavior of ants was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
