10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
[O08-03] Leaderless Cooperative Behavior ~Unraveling the Wisdom of Ant Society through Simple Behavioral Experiments and Mathematical Modeling
★Invited Papers
Keywords:behavior of ants, self-organization, mathematical model, simple experiment
Ant colonies—groups of ants sharing a single nest—have thrived for tens of millions of years while maintaining high productivity through remarkably complex cooperative behaviors, such as division of labor and shift work, all without the presence of a specific leader. Fascinated by this mechanism, we have been conducting research combining behavioral experiments and mathematical models.
As one example, we have attached RFID tags (like tiny versions of SUICA or ICOCA cards) to all the ants in a colony to automatically track their traffic to a food source over an extended period. Our findings suggest that a widely accepted hypothesis about how division of labor arises in colonies—namely, that there is a hierarchy of the diligence among individual ants for each task—may not be accurate.
Although this topic is a different field from Earth sciences, I hope to introduce an attempt to observe part of the complex natural phenomenon of ant colony organization through simple experiments.
As one example, we have attached RFID tags (like tiny versions of SUICA or ICOCA cards) to all the ants in a colony to automatically track their traffic to a food source over an extended period. Our findings suggest that a widely accepted hypothesis about how division of labor arises in colonies—namely, that there is a hierarchy of the diligence among individual ants for each task—may not be accurate.
Although this topic is a different field from Earth sciences, I hope to introduce an attempt to observe part of the complex natural phenomenon of ant colony organization through simple experiments.