Abstract
The cognitive abilities of biological organisms only make sense in the context of their environment. Here, we study longhorn crazy ant collective navigation skills within the context of a semi-natural, randomized environment. Mapping this biological setting into the 'Ant-in-a-Labyrinth' framework which studies physical transport through disordered media allows us to formulate precise links between the statistics of environmental challenges and the ants' collective navigation abilities. We show that, in this environment, the ants use their numbers to collectively extend their sensing range. Although this extension is moderate, it nevertheless allows for extremely fast traversal times that overshadow known physical solutions to the 'Ant-in-a-Labyrinth' problem. To explain this large payoff, we use percolation theory and prove that whenever the labyrinth is solvable, a logarithmically small sensing range suffices for extreme speedup. Overall, our work demonstrates the potential advantages of group living and collective cognition in increasing a species' habitable range.
Highlights
To cite this version: Aviram Gelblum, Ehud Fonio, Yoav Rodeh, Amos Korman, Ofer Feinerman
Ant collective cognition allows for efficient navigation through disordered environments
Our analysis can be broken into three parts: First,we prove that two distant points on a percolation grid above the percolation threshold (p=0.5) can be connected along a path that is fully confined to a narrow strip
Summary
To cite this version: Aviram Gelblum, Ehud Fonio, Yoav Rodeh, Amos Korman, Ofer Feinerman. HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. We study longhorn crazy ant collective navigation skills within the context of a semi-natural, randomized environment. Mapping this biological setting into the ‘Ant-in-a-. In this environment, the ants use their numbers to collectively extend their sensing range This extension is moderate, it allows for extremely fast traversal times that overshadow known physical solutions to the ‘Ant-in-a-Labyrinth’
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