Tiny ant brain creates highway crew that works before traffic jams

Scientists have discovered that long-horned crazy crazy ants operate like miniature highway departments, eliminating obstacles from the road before teammates even arrive with bulky cargo.

This discovery reveals how collective intelligence emerges from organisms with fewer neurons in the brain, whose neurons have cells than human thumbs.

As the ants worked together to drag the large food back to the nest, some workers sprinted to remove pebbles and debris from the expected path. This is the first time that researchers have documented this prospective behavior during collaborative transport of any ant species.

“Here, we show for the first time that workers of longhorn mad ants can clear obstacles on the road before they become problems – Dr. Ehud Fonio, a researcher at the Institute of Science in Israel, and author of the study published in the field in behavioral neuroscience, said Dr. Ehud Fonio, a researcher at the Institute of Science in Israel.

Highway works without engineers

The discovery was discovered when researchers noticed that individual ants picked up tiny gravel pebbles near groups with large insect prey. It seems that random housekeeping services are originally complicated logistics.

“When we first saw ants clearing small obstacles before the burden of moving in awe. It seems that these tiny creatures understand the difficulties ahead and try to help their friends ahead of time,” said Dr. Ofer Feinerman, a professor at the Weizmann Institute.

But appearance can be cheating. Through 83 carefully controlled experiments, the team discovered something more compelling than personal vision: ants reacted to chemical signals without understanding the overall situation.

The liquidation staff will strive to start at about 40 mm from the food source, especially for routes back to the nest. They carry about 50 mm of obstacles and then drop them off the main highway. A particularly hardworking ant cleared 64 obstacles in a row, and this record will leave any supervisor of the highway crew.

Chemical triggers and traffic management

When researchers realize that the obstructive behavior depends entirely on the pheromones trail – recruiting chemical breadcrumbs left by the ants. These scent marks are stored every 0.2 seconds, running with the ants to remind sisters of information about food discovery and used as trigger mechanisms.

When the researchers examined 155 cases of ants experiencing obstacles, they found that only 97.2% of cleanup decisions occurred when fresh pheromone markers were nearby. Ants that cannot detect these chemical signals simply move around obstacles rather than removing them.

This behavior proves to be very sensitive. When researchers provided the same food type in the crumbs, the ants could carry the crumbs alone, and the removal activity dropped sharply. When cooperative transportation is not required, the ant clears 32 times the obstacle and moves it shorter.

More convincing: Even without a large amount of food load, the ants cleared the obstacles to responding to the pheromonic trail. This happened when the researchers introduced tuna oil that triggered an abnormally high recruitment response, with 89.5% of the arrival of ants left the pheromone marker.

Distributed intelligent action

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that the ants don’t know. Almost half of the liquidation staff have never actually touched the food they are helping with transport. Some of the cleared obstacles did not approach the cargo.

“To sum up, these results suggest that our initial impression was wrong: In fact, individual workers simply don’t understand this. This clever behavior occurs at the level of the colonials, not at the level of the individual,” concluded Dr. Danielle Mersch, a postdoctoral researcher at the institute.

The study reveals how simple rules produce complex, seemingly planned behavior. Each ant follows basic chemistry tips without mastering the overall strategy, but together they create an effective transportation network.

Beyond simple reflection

Obstacle removal greatly improves efficiency. When researchers blocked narrow passages with plastic beads, transportation time increased by 18 times compared to transparent corridors. Ants must remove most obstacles before the goods pass.

But individual ants carrying small foods experience minimal delays from the same obstacles – they just sail around them. This suggests that clearance behavior is developed specifically to support group transport of oversized loads.

Time is also important. Obstacle removal occurs within minutes of food discovery and is much faster than the days of trail maintenance recorded in other ant species. About 25% of emptied ants become repeat performers, systematically working the same department around the food source.

“Humans think ahead by imagining future events in their minds; ants don’t do that. But through chemical signals and shared actions, ant colonies can act in amazingly clever ways—even if there is no single ants planning, they can achieve what seems to be planned,” Feinerman explains.

These findings provide insights on how distributed intelligent systems can solve complex problems without central coordination. From robot crowds to traffic management algorithms, understanding how simple agents create complex group behaviors can affect engineering approaches that do not rely on top-down control.

For the crazy ants of the longhorn, his brain contains only 25 to 1 million neurons compared to the 86 billion humans, and collective intelligence proves that sometimes the entire intelligence does exceed the sum of its parts.

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