Brain-like Ant Colony

An ant colony, according to some neuroscientists, operates roughly analogous to the human brain, where each ant behaves something analogous to a neuron. Individual ants communicate by chemical signals, which determines the overall behavior of the colony. Similarly, our neurons communicate via electrical and chemical signals, which result in our behavior.

If this analogy is appropriate, it raises the question, do ant colonies remember? Human memory is the result of many neurons acting together—creating retrievable recollections of past events and experiences. Our recall depends on how individual neurons stimulate each other. Short- and long-term memories employ different collections of neurons. Every time we summon up a memory, we rearrange some of the neural circuits and then send the memory back into “storage,” slightly altered. In this way, memories will gradually morph over time—although we tend to believe there's a constancy and an accuracy to our recollections. That certainty is really not there, however.

Furthermore, our memories are not just housed in some unique place deep in our brain. Our bodies—riddled with nerves and neurons—also remember. There's so-called “muscle memory,” by which we retain the knowledge of how to ride a bike or play a musical instrument. In response to wounds and germ attacks, antibodies and molecular receptors are created; they “remember” these events. The same mechanism happens for plants—trees “remember” physical wounds and insect attacks, so as to both heal and better respond in the future.

Back to ant colonies: If each ant is somehow comparable to individual brain neurons, and signals between ants are somehow comparable to neuronal communication, does the congregation of ants—the colony—display memory? Indeed it does. Although there is no central control agent in an ant colony, the community can remember, and that memory persists over days, months, and even years. Although an individual ant has a life span of months, the colony can live for up to 30 years, the lifetime of the queen. I have written before of the phenomenal behavior of an ant colony, as it performs activities far beyond what a single ant can do—such as tend graveyards and gardens, keep the nest clean, coordinate attacks, etc. These abilities depend to some extent on memory.

In fact, researchers have discovered that while individual ants can only briefly remember the location of food, the colony retains that knowledge for much longer periods of time. What's more, an older ant colony acts more wisely than a younger colony—showing an accumulation of knowledge over time.

The enhanced performance of large collections of individual creatures is often described as an emergent property. It is a process that has yet to be fully understood. Similarly, our memory—and in fact, our consciousness—still have much to be explained.

So if an individual ant can be considered to be something analogous to a brain's neuron, we might be grateful that an ant colony contains only thousands of ants. Were those colonies to be inhabited by a few million—or, God forbid!—a few billion insects, they would be smarter than us! Doesn't the possibility of having the Earth ruled by ant colonies seem frightening?