Bochynek and his team monitored colonies of leaf-cutter ants in the lab and in nature to see how fast they cleared a transit path through debris and how many ants pitched in at a given time. They also built a computer model to hypothesise a typical, randomised rate of clearance based on each ant's likelihood of encountering an obstruction by chance and then clearing it.
If the ants communicated specific commands between themselves to clear a particular blockage, the removal rates would speed up or slow down, depending on whether they were chatting it up or working together. But the opposite was true: the team found a virtually linear increase in the number of removed objects over time, something that would be "inexplicable" were the ants coordinating.
Originally shared by Joe Carter
The term "eusocial" was first introduced in 1966 by Suzanne Batra who used it to describe nesting behavior in Halictine bees. Eusociality, in a broad sense, is where some groups of individuals specialize behaviors that might be disadvantageous to the individuals or groups, but are a benefit the fitness of the whole group. These groups together act like social organs, nourishing and defending each other so that the entire community benefits.
Eusociality is the most advanced form of social organization and is the ecologically dominant role of social insects and humans. It could be called collateral altruism from a certain perspective. The entomologist, E.O. Wiilson argues that humans are eusocial because we exhibit the same kinds of specialization and corresponding group fitness, and as a result, realize the emergent benefits of such an arrangement.
From a certain perspective, eusociality is an extension same adaptive structural strategy involved in the evolution of eukaryotic cells, where various organelles operate as organs which behave on this principle of collective fitness, and the development of complex organs, each specialized unit operating under a common theme of the nourishment and defense of the whole community - some oriented primarily around nourishment (digestive system, etc.), some around defense (Immune system etc.). Eusociality coul dbe viewed as a self similar isomorph of this cooperative theme.
Our biological brethren, the ants, do certain things involving social organs that, while unconscious of the whole community, noinetheless oprtate to nourish and defend that communal whole, it seems out of the same emergent expressive group action that we do. Here's a closer look:
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-ants-megaprojects.html
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