When he’s not busy watching his aunts ants have sex, E.O. Wilson analyzes how they build structures with a communal “brain.” And he’s not the only one interested in this subject. Understanding the hive mentality of these ingenious insects could help humans master swarm robotics and unlock secrets to cellular “behavior.” From Emily Singer at the Guardian:

“Scientists have been studying the social behavior of ants and other insects for decades, searching for chemical cues and other signals that the insects use to coordinate behavior. Much of this work has focused on understanding how ants decide where to forage or build their homes. But new research combining observations of ant behavior with modern imaging techniques and computational modeling is beginning to reveal the secrets of ant construction. It turns out that ants perform these complex tasks by obeying a few simple rules.

‘People are finally starting to crack the problem of producing these structures, which are either made out of soil or the ants themselves,’ said Stephen Pratt, a biologist at Arizona State University. The organization of insect societies is a marquee example of a complex decentralized system that arises from the interactions of many individuals, he said.

Cracking these problems could lead to improvements in swarm robotics, large numbers of simple robots working together, as well as self-healing materials and other systems capable of organizing and fixing themselves. More broadly, identifying the rules that ants obey could help scientists understand how biologically complex systems emerge — for example, how groups of cells give rise to organs.”

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Ant-sploitation from 1977: