Ants are better at teamwork than humans

Nature has once again proven to be an efficient designer, showing time and again how ant teamwork is much better than that of humans. 

“Teamwork is often assumed to enhance group performance, particularly for physical tasks. However, in both human and non-human animal teams, the effort contributed by each member may, in fact, decrease as team size grows,” researchers wrote in a study recently published in the journal Current Biology. This phenomenon is called the Ringelmann effect. 

Macquarie University behavioural ecologist Madelyne Stewardson and her  team decided to investigate whether asian weaver ants (Oecophylla smaragdina) are also afflicted by the Ringelmass effect. This arboreal ant species is found in Africa, Asia, and Australia, where they build their leafy, aerial nests by assembling into a chain to pass along leaves.

To measure the force applied by ant teams during this process, Stewardson and her colleagues studied weaver ant chains as they pulled an artificial leaf attached to a force meter. The team documented that, “the ants split their work into two jobs: some actively pull while others act like anchors to store that pulling force,” Stewardson explained in a statement. The ants at the front of the chain pull, while the ones at the back store the force.

In their newly developed “force ratchet” theory, the team believes that this organization allows the ants to contribute more individually as the team grows. A ratchet is a tool or machine part that enables movement in only one direction. 

“Each individual ant almost doubled their pulling force as team size increased – they actually get better at working together as the group gets bigger,” said Stewardson.

“Longer chains of ants have more grip on the ground than single ants, so they can better resist the force of the leaf pulling back,” added  David Labonte, a co-author of the study and bioengineer from Imperial College London. “The long chains effectively store the pulling force from individual ants in friction — together, the team seems to work like a ratchet.”

You might be wondering what the point of this discovery is, beyond making us feel bad about our own teamworking skills. The answer is robots.

[ Related: Even ants may hold grudges. ]

As of now, individual robots in teams can only produce as much force as when they’re working alone (which, by the way, still makes them better at this kind of work than humans). But the force ratchet theory from weaver ants could inspire designs for even more efficient robot teams. 

“Programming robots to adopt ant-inspired cooperative strategies, like the force ratchet, could allow teams of autonomous robots to work together more efficiently, accomplishing more than the sum of their individual efforts,” concluded co-author and Macquarie University behavioural ecologist Chris Reid.

 

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