Biological Complexity

Prof. Ofer Feinerman

How thousands of ants without a leader pool sensing, memory, and muscle into one decision-making whole

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01 / Research

Research

The group studies how cooperation emerges in social insects, using longhorn crazy ants and their cooperative load transport as a tractable model for collective computation. By tracking individual ants while they jointly carry food far too large for any one of them, the work asks how local mechanical and chemical interactions, without central control, give rise to coordinated motion, shared navigation, and group-level decisions. The questions sit at the interface of statistical physics and biology: when does a crowd of limited agents behave as a single cognitive unit, and how is information distributed across the bodies that compose it.

This matters because collective behavior is a general route by which biological systems solve problems that exceed individual capacity, from cells in tissues to neurons in brains. Treating the ant group as a physical system, the group quantifies how individuals balance personal information against conformity, how transient leaders inject correction without disrupting consensus, and how the group navigates and recovers from errors. The results illuminate the limits and advantages of decentralized computation and connect measurable animal behavior to broader theory on emergent intelligence.

High-speed video trackingIndividual-level trajectory analysisBehavioral experimentsStatistical physics modelingNetwork analysisForce and motion measurement

Cooperative load transportQuantifying how many ants jointly carry large loads, coordinating force and direction without a leader through local mechanical and chemical cues.

Individuals versus the collectiveMeasuring when and how single informed ants steer or correct a group, and how individual variation is averaged or amplified at the group scale.

Collective problem solvingStudying how groups navigate obstacles, escape traps, and recover from errors that exceed any single ant's sensing or memory.

Communication and interaction networksMapping the contact, pheromone, and force-mediated networks through which information propagates and decisions are reached.

Group cognition and informationAsking what it means for a colony to sense, remember, and decide, framing collective behavior in terms of distributed information processing.

02 / People