What ants teach us about the brain, cancer

and the Internet

Deborah Gordon · Ecologist

By studying how ant colonies work without any one leader,

00:12
I study ants in the desert, in the tropical forest and in my kitchen,
and in the hills around Silicon Valley where I live. I've recently
realized that ants are using interactions differently in different
environments, and that got me thinking that we could learn from
this about other systems, like brains and data networks that we
engineer, and even cancer.
00:41
So what all these systems have in common is that there's no
central control. An ant colony consists of sterile female workers --
those are the ants you see walking around — and then one or more
reproductive females who just lay the eggs. They don't give any
instructions. Even though they're called queens, they don't tell
anybody what to do. So in an ant colony, there's no one in charge,
and all systems like this without central control are regulated using
very simple interactions. Ants interact using smell. They smell with
their antennae, and they interact with their antennae, so when one

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ant touches another with its antennae, it can tell, for example, if
the other ant is a nestmate and what task that other ant has been
doing. So here you see a lot of ants moving around and interacting
in a lab arena that's connected by tubes to two other arenas. So
when one ant meets another, it doesn't matter which ant it meets,
and they're actually not transmitting any kind of complicated
signal or message. All that matters to the ant is the rate at which it
meets other ants. And all of these interactions, taken together,
produce a network. So this is the network of the ants that you just
saw moving around in the arena, and it's this constantly shifting
network that produces the behavior of the colony, like whether all
the ants are hiding inside the nest, or how many are going out to
forage. A brain actually works in the same way, but what's great
about ants is that you can see the whole network as it happens.
02:23
There are more than 12,000 species of ants, in every conceivable
environment, and they're using interactions differently to meet
different environmental challenges. So one important
environmental challenge that every system has to deal with is
operating costs, just what it takes to run the system. And another
environmental challenge is resources, finding them and collecting
them. In the desert, operating costs are high because water is
scarce, and the seed-eating ants that I study in the desert have to
spend water to get water. So an ant outside foraging, searching
for seeds in the hot sun, just loses water into the air. But the colony
gets its water by metabolizing the fats out of the seeds that they
eat. So in this environment, interactions are used to activate
foraging. An outgoing forager doesn't go out unless it gets enough
interactions with returning foragers, and what you see are the
returning foragers going into the tunnel, into the nest, and meeting
outgoing foragers on their way out. This makes sense for the ant
colony, because the more food there is out there, the more quickly
the foragers find it, the faster they come back, and the more

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foragers they send out. The system works to stay stopped, unless
something positive happens.
03:39
So interactions function to activate foragers. And we've been
studying the evolution of this system. First of all, there's variation.
It turns out that colonies are different. On dry days, some colonies
forage less, so colonies are different in how they manage this
trade-off between spending water to search for seeds and getting
water back in the form of seeds. And we're trying to understand
why some colonies forage less than others by thinking about ants
as neurons, using models from neuroscience. So just as a neuron
adds up its stimulation from other neurons to decide whether to
fire, an ant adds up its stimulation from other ants to decide
whether to forage. And what we're looking for is whether there
might be small differences among colonies in how many
interactions each ant needs before it's willing to go out and forage,
because a colony like that would forage less.
04:32
And this raises an analogous question about brains. We talk about
the brain, but of course every brain is slightly different, and maybe
there are some individuals or some conditions in which the
electrical properties of neurons are such that they require more
stimulus to fire, and that would lead to differences in brain
function.
04:53
So in order to ask evolutionary questions, we need to know about
reproductive success. This is a map of the study site where I have
been tracking this population of harvester ant colonies for 28
years, which is about as long as a colony lives. Each symbol is a
colony, and the size of the symbol is how many offspring it had,
because we were able to use genetic variation to match up parent
and offspring colonies, that is, to figure out which colonies were

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founded by a daughter queen produced by which parent colony.
And this was amazing for me, after all these years, to find out, for
example, that colony 154, whom I've known well for many years,
is a great-grandmother. Here's her daughter colony, here's her
granddaughter colony, and these are her great-granddaughter
colonies. And by doing this, I was able to learn that offspring
colonies resemble parent colonies in their decisions about which
days are so hot that they don't forage, and the offspring of parent
colonies live so far from each other that the ants never meet, so
the ants of the offspring colony can't be learning this from the
parent colony. And so our next step is to look for the genetic
variation underlying this resemblance.
06:07
So then I was able to ask, okay, who's doing better? Over the time
of the study, and especially in the past 10 years, there's been a
very severe and deepening drought in the Southwestern U.S., and
it turns out that the colonies that conserve water, that stay in when
it's really hot outside, and thus sacrifice getting as much food as
possible, are the ones more likely to have offspring colonies. So
all this time, I thought that colony 154 was a loser, because on
really dry days, there'd be just this trickle of foraging, while the
other colonies were out foraging, getting lots of food, but in fact,
colony 154 is a huge success. She's a matriarch. She's one of the
rare great-grandmothers on the site. To my knowledge, this is the
first time that we've been able to track the ongoing evolution of
collective behavior in a natural population of animals and find out
what's actually working best.
07:04
Now, the Internet uses an algorithm to regulate the flow of data
that's very similar to the one that the harvester ants are using to
regulate the flow of foragers. And guess what we call this analogy?
The anternet is coming. (Applause) So data doesn't leave the

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source computer unless it gets a signal that there's enough
bandwidth for it to travel on. In the early days of the Internet, when
operating costs were really high and it was really important not to
lose any data, then the system was set up for interactions to
activate the flow of data. It's interesting that the ants are using an
algorithm that's so similar to the one that we recently invented, but
this is only one of a handful of ant algorithms that we know about,
and ants have had 130 million years to evolve a lot of good ones,
and I think it's very likely that some of the other 12,000 species are
going to have interesting algorithms for data networks that we
haven't even thought of yet.
08:10
So what happens when operating costs are low? Operating costs
are low in the tropics, because it's very humid, and it's easy for the
ants to be outside walking around. But the ants are so abundant
and diverse in the tropics that there's a lot of competition.
Whatever resource one species is using, another species is likely
to be using that at the same time. So in this environment,
interactions are used in the opposite way. The system keeps going
unless something negative happens, and one species that I study
makes circuits in the trees of foraging ants going from the nest to
a food source and back, just round and round, unless something
negative happens, like an interaction with ants of another species.
So here's an example of ant security. In the middle, there's an ant
plugging the nest entrance with its head in response to
interactions with another species. Those are the little ones running
around with their abdomens up in the air. But as soon as the threat
is passed, the entrance is open again, and maybe there are
situations in computer security where operating costs are low
enough that we could just block access temporarily in response to
an immediate threat, and then open it again, instead of trying to
build a permanent firewall or fortress.

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09:33
So another environmental challenge that all systems have to deal
with is resources, finding and collecting them. And to do this, ants
solve the problem of collective search, and this is a problem that's
of great interest right now in robotics, because we've understood
that, rather than sending a single, sophisticated, expensive robot
out to explore another planet or to search a burning building, that
instead, it may be more effective to get a group of cheaper robots
exchanging only minimal information, and that's the way that ants
do it. So the invasive Argentine ant makes expandable search
networks. They're good at dealing with the main problem of
collective search, which is the trade-off between searching very
thoroughly and covering a lot of ground. And what they do is, when
there are many ants in a small space, then each one can search
very thoroughly because there will be another ant nearby
searching over there, but when there are a few ants in a large
space, then they need to stretch out their paths to cover more
ground. I think they use interactions to assess density, so when
they're really crowded, they meet more often, and they search
more thoroughly. Different ant species must use different
algorithms, because they've evolved to deal with different
resources, and it could be really useful to know about this, and so
we recently asked ants to solve the collective search problem in
the extreme environment of microgravity in the International Space
Station. When I first saw this picture, I thought, Oh no, they've
mounted the habitat vertically, but then I realized that, of course,
it doesn't matter. So the idea here is that the ants are working so
hard to hang on to the wall or the floor or whatever you call it that
they're less likely to interact, and so the relationship between how
crowded they are and how often they meet would be messed up.
We're still analyzing the data. I don't have the results yet. But it
would be interesting to know how other species solve this problem
in different environments on Earth, and so we're setting up a
program to encourage kids around the world to try this experiment

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with different species. It's very simple. It can be done with cheap
materials. And that way, we could make a global map of ant
collective search algorithms. And I think it's pretty likely that the
invasive species, the ones that come into our buildings, are going
to be really good at this, because they're in your kitchen because
they're really good at finding food and water.
12:09
So the most familiar resource for ants is a picnic, and this is a
clustered resource. When there's one piece of fruit, there's likely
to be another piece of fruit nearby, and the ants that specialize on
clustered resources use interactions for recruitment. So when one
ant meets another, or when it meets a chemical deposited on the
ground by another, then it changes direction to follow in the
direction of the interaction, and that's how you get the trail of ants
sharing your picnic.
12:36
Now this is a place where I think we might be able to learn
something from ants about cancer. I mean, first, it's obvious that
we could do a lot to prevent cancer by not allowing people to
spread around or sell the toxins that promote the evolution of
cancer in our bodies, but I don't think the ants can help us much
with this because ants never poison their own colonies. But we
might be able to learn something from ants about treating cancer.
There are many different kinds of cancer. Each one originates in a
particular part of the body, and then some kinds of cancer will
spread or metastasize to particular other tissues where they must
be getting resources that they need. So if you think from the
perspective of early metastatic cancer cells as they're out
searching around for the resources that they need, if those
resources are clustered, they're likely to use interactions for
recruitment, and if we can figure out how cancer cells are
recruiting, then maybe we could set traps to catch them before

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they become established.
13:37
So ants are using interactions in different ways in a huge variety of
environments, and we could learn from this about other systems
that operate without central control. Using only simple
interactions, ant colonies have been performing amazing feats for
more than 130 million years. We have a lot to learn from them.
13:58
Thank you.
14:01
(Applause)