Study shows that the more tunnels means more food colony for ants

A study shows that the more connected the chambers an ant colony builds near the surface entrance, the faster the ants are able to collect nearby sources of food. The study of the underground "architecture" of harvester ant nests was conducted by UC San Diego. Here is the reason: Increased connectivity among chambers result in more social interactions among the ants within the nest. So when one group of ants within a colony which is comprised of individuals working toward a common goal, finds a particularly good source of food, it can more quickly communicate that finding to the rest of the colony. "The volume of the chambers has little influence on the speed of recruitment, suggesting that the spatial organization of a nest has a greater impact on collective behavior than the number of workers it can hold," said Noa Pinter-Wollman, a biologist at UC San Diego who conducted the study, which was published in this week's issue of the journal Biology Letters. She believes they can potentially inspire architectural designs that promote collaboration among humans. "One straightforward lesson that will probably not surprise many architects is that having more corridors connecting offices or rooms will facilitate easier movement of people among them, both promoting interactions and expediting evacuation in emergency," she said. "However, a less obvious potential addition to this lesson would be that increasing the connectivity of locations with an important function, such as break rooms, where people interact—similar to the entrance chamber of the ants—could increase interactions and collaborations." Other research was conducted by Noa Pinter-Wollman, who is a research scientist at UC San Diego's BioCircuits Institute. Her study was the first to find a link between a "naturally occurring nest architecture and the collective actions of the colony that resides in it." While more interconnected chambers near the entrance to the nest provides an advantage to food recruitment, she noted that there is also a downside to having too many chambers near the surface. Such an architecture could introduce structural instabilities that would cause the chambers to collapse during rains when the ground is softened, she noted. It will be interesting to see whether the harvester ants will build deeper chambers than before. More can be read here:http://www.cusabio.com/ELISA-Kit/Goat-Apolipoprotein-B-APOB-ELISA-kit-1042036.html