Weaver ants form the most elaborate communicative organization in the insect world. They form complex organizations through their simple intelligence to emerge as an elaborate social structure. At first the queen ant lays her eggs among tree leaves while the worker ants engage in building the nest. This emergent ant society helps in building the nest by weaving together living tree leaves. This is done by first forming ant chains that hold together leaves and then manipulating the ant larva to produce silk in order to glue the tree leaves. Thus the ant colony emerges with the queen in the center of the nest whose only purpose is to lay eggs while female ants engage in building the nest. The entire nest building activity is a very distributed process involving every ant.
The emergence of complex organization among Weaver ants, from simple biological intelligence is a model for social communication processes in organizations and artificial intelligence. It is extensively modeled and studied in the emergence of complex behavior from simple rules in diverse disciplines of generative sciences. The Weaver ants emergent organization and eating behavior is applied as natural bio-control of pests in orchards, where they are introduced on trees in order to build nests and act as natural pest control.
All text is available under the terms
of the GNU Free Documentation License
|