Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (Primers in Complex Systems) - Softcover

Gordon, Deborah M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691138796 ISBN 13: 9780691138794

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

How do ant colonies get anything done, when no one is in charge? An ant colony operates without a central control or hierarchy, and no ant directs another. Instead, ants decide what to do based on the rate, rhythm, and pattern of individual encounters and interactions--resulting in a dynamic network that coordinates the functions of the colony. Ant Encounters provides a revealing and accessible look into ant behavior from this complex systems perspective.

Focusing on the moment-to-moment behavior of ant colonies, Deborah Gordon investigates the role of interaction networks in regulating colony behavior and relations among ant colonies. She shows how ant behavior within and between colonies arises from local interactions of individuals, and how interaction networks develop as a colony grows older and larger. The more rapidly ants react to their encounters, the more sensitively the entire colony responds to changing conditions. Gordon explores whether such reactive networks help a colony to survive and reproduce, how natural selection shapes colony networks, and how these structures compare to other analogous complex systems.

Ant Encounters sheds light on the organizational behavior, ecology, and evolution of these diverse and ubiquitous social insects.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Deborah M. Gordon is professor of biology at Stanford University. She is the author of Ants at Work (Norton).

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Deborah Gordon has produced a delightful and scholarly introduction to ant colony organization that teaches as it entertains. Building on decades of observation, experimentation, and simulation, she convincingly demonstrates that ants form self-organized communities, in which individual tasks change dynamically as conditions and interaction networks shift. Placing her work in a historical framework that reaches from Darwin to political theory, Gordon conclusively makes the case that ant societies are model systems for the study of collective behavior."--Simon A. Levin, Princeton University

"Deborah Gordon's amazingly detailed book on the complex web of interactions in ant colonies makes fascinating reading for anyone who is curious about the world around us. And--even more interestingly from my point of view--this book provides rich fodder for understanding other kinds of collective intelligence, from neurons in the brain to human societies linked by the Internet."--Thomas W. Malone, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Ant societies are like--and not like--human societies. Deborah Gordon's new book takes on these fascinating contradictions and achieves the rare balance of serving as an introduction for those wishing to learn about the wonders of the ant society, as well as a guide to the latest developments in group functioning and development."--Peter Nonacs, University of California, Los Angeles

"Gordon convincingly argues that the behavior of ants within and outside a colony depends largely upon the simple metric of interactions with others. Provocative and stimulating, this book challenges prevailing paradigms and dogmas about social insect behavior. It will engage biologists interested in social insects and nonbiologists interested in complex systems."--Mark Elgar, University of Melbourne

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

ANT ENCOUNTERS

Interaction Networks and Colony BehaviorBy Deborah M. Gordon

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13879-4

Contents

List of Illustrations............................................ixPreface..........................................................xi1. The Ant Colony as a Complex System............................12. Colony Organization...........................................14The Diversity of Ant Behavior....................................14From Individual to Collective Behavior...........................19Division of Labor................................................25Ants Switch Tasks................................................30Age Polyethism...................................................33What Ants Respond to.............................................37Task Allocation..................................................413. Interaction Networks..........................................45What Happens at network nodes....................................47The Pattern of Interaction Is the Message........................49Rate and Memory..................................................57Individual Variation.............................................63species Differences..............................................674. Colony Size...................................................75Colony Growth....................................................75Task Allocation and Colony Size..................................83Ecology, Behavior, and Mature Colony Size........................905. Relations with Neighbors......................................96Relations with Neighbors of the Same Species.....................97Interactions between Species.....................................107Invasive Species.................................................112From Ecology to Behavior.........................................1176. Ant Evolution.................................................121Coevolution of Ants and Plants...................................121Evolution of Colony Organization.................................125Natural Selection in Action......................................1317. Modeling Ant Behavior.........................................141Notes............................................................147Index............................................................165

Chapter One

THE ANT COLONY AS A COMPLEX SYSTEM

Ants are more than a hundred million years older than humans, and they cover the land surface of the planet. Probably people have always watched ants, and probably they have always asked the same question: How can ants get anything done when no one is in charge? Whoever wrote Proverbs 6:6 put it this way: "Look to the ant, thou sluggard-consider her ways and be wise. Without chief, overseer or ruler, she gathers the harvest in the summer to eat in the winter." The history of our understanding of ant behavior is the history of our changing views of how organizations work.

There have been times when it was impossible to imagine an ant colony without a leader. The scientific study of ants began when natural history joined the rest of the emerging sciences in the eighteenth century. It was already clear that ants live in colonies, consisting of one or more reproductive females, while the rest are sterile females. Among bees, the reproductive female in a colony was called the 'queen,' and the females who do not reproduce called 'workers,' by Charles Butler in The Feminine Monarchie, or the Historie of Bees, in 1609. These observations of bees were extended to ants in the eighteenth century by the French naturalist Raumur. Like his contemporaries, such as Maeterlinck, writing about bees, Raumur described ants as a group of subordinate laborers happy to serve their monarch. Although these names imply a hierarchy that in other times, both before and since Raumur, was known not to exist, the names 'queen' and 'worker' have stuck. Two hundred and fifty years later, scientists have identified more than 11,000 species of ants, and they all live in colonies of females, with some sterile and some reproductive.

The 150 years that followed Raumur's vision of ants as contented subjects of a benevolent queen brought worldwide political upheaval, raising questions of whether monarchy is the most natural form of society. This period (1750-1900), in which evolutionary biology was born, generated thinking about democracy, revolution, freedom, and cooperation, all of which influenced the ways we see the natural world, including ants. In a lively discussion in the Ecole Normale in Paris in 1795, year 3 of the French Revolution, Daubenton, a professor of natural history, argued that there is no royalty in nature-for example, the queen bee does nothing more than lay eggs. His colleague Latreille wrote in 1798 that the ants in the colony are not really subjugated workers; instead, the colony has "a single will, a single law" based on the love each ant feels for the others.

Throughout the nineteenth century, colonial expansion put Europeans in contact with the stunning diversity of the tropics. Evolutionary biology and ecology began out of the effort, which is still under way, to explain this diversity. The idea of natural selection as the outcome of ecological processes, what Darwin called "the struggle for survival," gradually became the basis for the scientific study of all organisms.

Skipping over many crucial discoveries about the life cycles, physiology, and natural history of insects generally and ants in particular, we could locate the beginning of contemporary scientific work on ants with the efforts of W. M. Wheeler. Wheeler borrowed from Herbert Spencer the term "superorganism," comparing the ant colony not to a kingdom but to a single organism, with the queen and workers all acting as cells that contribute to the life of one reproducing body. Because ants do not make more ants, but instead colonies reproduce to make more colonies, a colony is in fact an individual organism in the ecological sense. As the gametes of different trees join, when pollen meets ovary, to make the seeds that produce new trees, so the reproductives of different colonies mate to produce new colonies.

With the colony as superorganism, the queen is no longer in charge, and we return to the puzzle of how such a system could be organized. This issue resonated with general questions about cooperation in animals raised in the early twentieth century by authors like Kropotkin, a Russian aristocrat turned anarchist. Do the ants work for the good of the colony, in the same way that cells work for the good of the body, and is this because evolution favors those who cooperate?

Despite all the transformations in our thinking about society, it is still very difficult for us to describe ant society without depicting it as hierarchically organized. Someone is always in charge. Either the bad guys are in charge, and the lowly workers feel oppressed and rebellious, or the good guys are in charge, and the lowly workers are happy. During the Cold War, ants were models of a totalitarian society. In The Book of Merlyn by T. H. White, Merlin transforms the young Arthur into an ant and sends him to work in a desolate tunnel with loudspeakers blaring allegiance to an ant Big Brother and walls plastered with signs reading "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." More recently, movies such as Antz, It's a Bug's Life, and The Ant Bully show...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691138796
• ISBN 13: 9780691138794
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 167
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar