Biology

A colony of 100,000 ants reorganized its hierarchy after losing its queen

100K

Ants simulated

The challenge

A biology research team wanted to study how ant colonies develop optimal foraging routes without centralized communication. Lab experiments were limited to hundreds of individuals.

What we did

We simulated colonies of 100,000 ants with behavior based on pheromones, food detection and tactile communication. Each ant was an autonomous being with simple rules. We watched intelligence emerge at scale.

Results

—2 survival strategies not documented in the scientific literature
—Confirmation of optimality theory for large-scale foraging networks
—Critical colony-size threshold where efficiency drops
—Paper under review at a computational entomology journal

“What we cannot observe in nature, we can now create.”

Principal Investigator

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