Anternet: Ant Colony Networking Solutions to Ecological Problems

Like many distributed systems, both natural and engineered, ant colonies operate without any central control. No ant can assess what needs to be done. Each ant responds to its interactions with other ants nearby and in the aggregate, these dynamical networks of interaction regulate colony behavior. Ecological studies show how collective organization evolves to respond to local, changing conditions. Harvester ant colonies living in the desert in Arizona use a simple positive feedback system, without any spatial information, to adjust foraging activity to the food supply. The rate at which foragers return to the nest with food determines the rate at which outgoing foragers leave the nest to search for more food.Turtle ant colonies living in the tropical forest in Mexico use interactions at temporary nest sites to regulate the shape and stability of the circuit of ants travelling through the trees. The talk will discuss models based on analogies between these systems and other dynamical networks, including the internet and brains. Exploring these analogies helps to elucidate how collective behavior evolves, shaping distributed algorithms in relation to changing environments.

Deborah M Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford. She studies the evolution of collective organization by investigating the ecology and behavior of ant colonies. Her work includes the long-term demography and behavior of harvester ant colonies in Arizona; the factors that determine the spread of the invasive Argentine ant in northern California; and the ecology of ant-plant mutualisms in tropical forests in Central America. She is the author of two books, Ants at Work (2000) and Ant Encounters:Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (2010). She has been awarded fellowships from Guggenheim and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. She is interested in analogies between ant colonies and other distributed networks such as brains, the immune system, the internet, and distributed robotic systems.