Audrey Dussutour never had a special fondness for ants, but over the last decade, she’s gotten to know them very well—especially their propensity to act as a single organism though hundreds or thousands of individuals may comprise a single colony. “It’s fascinating, because it works exactly opposite to humans—there’s no leader,” she says. Her first introduction to this collective behavior in an undergraduate course was enough to convince her that it was the field for her. “Ants were just the model organism.”
As a Masters student under Jean-Louis Deneubourg at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, Dussutour designed a two-pronged pathway from an experimental ant nest to a food source to examine how the flow of ants changed as she modified the width of each trail. The organisms, she found, used collisions as a feedback signal to self-regulate their movement patterns.1 “This study was published in Nature, so it ...
