New research shows that ants, even those who don’t know what they’re doing individually, can work as a team to reprioritize their tasks and make decisions as a group. Can this help us choose a home for our families or the best school for our kids? I’m not sure, but some Arizona State scientists are looking into that possibility, it seems.
All animals have to make decisions every day. Where will they live and what will they eat? How will they protect themselves? They often have to make these decisions as a group, too, turning what may seem like a simple choice into a far more nuanced process. So, how do animals know what’s best for their survival?
For the first time, Arizona State University researchers have discovered that at least in ants, animals can change their decision-making strategies based on experience. They can also use that experience to weigh different options.
The findings are featured in the early online edition (Nov 5) of the scientific journal Biology Letters, as well as in its Dec 23 edition.
Co-authors Taka Sasaki and Stephen Pratt, both with ASU’s School of Life Sciences, have studied insect collectives, such as ants, for years. Sasaki, a postdoctoral research associate, specializes in adapting psychological theories and experiments that are designed for humans to ants, hoping to understand how the collective decision-making process arises out of individually ignorant ants.
“Individually ignorant ants”?? That designation of ants as having relative levels of ignorance needs more explanation, which I would provide if it had been provided to me.
“The interesting thing is we can make decisions and ants can make decisions—but ants do it collectively,” said Sasaki. “So how different are we from ant colonies?”
At this point I’m wondering if that’s a rhetorical question. Probably not, though. Ethologists. Ha. Only kidding. Dr Sasaki, probably, meant to say, “So how are we different from ant colonies?” Gotta watch that word order when quoting someone.
To answer this question, Sasaki and Pratt gave a number of Temnothorax rugatulus ant colonies a series of choices between two nests with differing qualities. In one treatment, the entrances of the nests had varied sizes, and in the other, the exposure to light was manipulated. Since these ants prefer both a smaller entrance size and a lower level of light exposure, they had to prioritize.
“It’s kind of like a humans and buying a house,” said Pratt, an associate professor with the school. “There’s so many options to consider: the size, the number of rooms, the neighborhood, the price, if there’s a pool. The list goes on and on. And for the ants it’s similar, since they live in cavities that can be dark or light, big or small. With all of these things, just like with a human house, it’s very unlikely to find a home that has everything you want.”
Pratt continued to explain that because it is impossible to find the perfect habitat, ants make various trade-offs for certain qualities, ordering them in a queue of most important aspects. But, when faced with a decision between two different homes, the ants displayed a previously unseen level of intelligence.
According to their data, the series of choices the ants faced caused them to reprioritize their preferences based on the type of decision they faced. Ants that had to choose a nest based on light level prioritized light level over entrance size in the final choice. On the other hand, ants that had to choose a nest based on entrance size ranked light level lower in the later experiment.
This is where I got interested in this research. If we have to choose a school based on test scores, as corporate reformers want us to, we are more likely to rank other qualities lower on our priority list later in our lives—at least if we’re like ants in this regard. Meaning, the children in school now, under No Child Left Behind’s massive data and testing protocols, would be predicted, based on these ant experiments, to make decisions about quality schools for their children, 15 or 20 years hence, using mostly test scores and reducing the priority of other factors in their decision-making process, such as the actual quality of the school, the resources available, the quality of extracurricular programs, and so on.
This means that, like people, ants take the past into account when weighing options while making a choice. The difference is that ants somehow manage to do this as a colony without any dissent. While this research builds on groundwork previously laid down by Sasaki and Pratt, the newest experiments have already raised more questions.
“You have hundreds of these ants, and somehow they have to reach a consensus,” Pratt said. “How do they do it without anyone in charge to tell them what to do?”
Wait! Are they saying that we don’t need any politicians, test publishers, multistate testing consortia, or business people telling us what to do in our classrooms? We can rely just on the group of teachers to do the right thing? Because that’s what it sounds like.
Pratt likened individual ants to individual neurons in the human brain. Both play a key role in the decision-making process, but no one understands how every neuron influences a decision.
Sasaki and Pratt hope to delve deeper into the realm of ant behavior so that one day, they can understand how individual ants influence the colony. Their greater goal is to apply what they discover to help society better understand how humanity can make collective decisions with the same ease ants display.
“This helps us learn how collective decision-making works and how it’s different from individual decision-making,” said Pratt. “And ants aren’t the only animals that make collective decisions—humans do, too. So maybe we can gain some general insight.”
Or, maybe not. As with most studies where researchers try to study human traits by studying animal behavior, any application to human decision-making is far-fetched. But from a scientific point of view, have we humans become so jaded by our environment that scientists can’t control external variables enough to study human decision-making in humans? That last quote, the kicker in this press release, strikes me as non-scientific. Ants can teach us a lot about ants, to be sure, and that alone is a worthwhile pursuit. Not everything in science has to have a human application, so please, take my comments as entertainment only.
But … with the myriad decisions teachers have to make in their classrooms, I thought it might help to focus on the decision-making process itself a little. And one good way to do that, as Drs Pratt and Sasaki did, is to strip away all the extraneous thoughts in out brain around the decisions and just look at how ants make a simpler decision, without as many variables. If we teach kids the best indicator of school or teacher quality is a test score, every other factor will be placed lower and lower on the priority list as their generation grows up.