The frenetic scurrying of ants around a nest may seem like much ado about nothing. There’s method in the madness, however.
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All this activity adds up to ingenious strategies for collectively working out the shortest path to a food source, combining forces to move a large, unwieldy object, and performing other functions crucial to an ant colony’s well-being.
In effect, astonishing feats of teamwork emerge from a large number of unsupervised individuals following a few simple rules. It’s an example of self-organizing cooperative behavior, and it’s found among ants, bees, and other social insects.