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The physics of cooperative transport in groups of ants

Nature Physics volume 14, pages 683–693 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Anyone who has moved furniture together with friends will appreciate that cooperative transport requires some non-trivial communication. Yet ants are adept at collectively moving objects several times their size. How they do so has long been a subject of research, but recent advances have suggested that this communication occurs through the forces the ants exert on the load. This implies that the collective transport problem can be mapped to an Ising model, in which decisions by individual ants are described by spin flips. Within this framework, the group is poised in the vicinity of the transition between uncoordinated and coordinated motion. It thus profits from both internal coordination and maximal responsiveness to external information, mediated by temporarily informed leader ants. Here, we review the implications of these findings for cooperative transport, and discuss the way in which a more complete multiscale understanding of such systems would require the development of a new formalism that combines statistical physics of interacting particles with the cognitive capabilities of individuals.

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Fig. 1: Cooperative transport.
Fig. 2: Empirical findings and theoretical model.
Fig. 3: Criticality, susceptibility and leadership.
Fig. 4: Oscillatory motion under constrained conditions.
Fig. 5: Increasing system size transits the system between order and disorder in experiment and simulation.
Fig. 6: Phase transitions under constrained motion.
Fig. 7: Oscillatory motion in a different species.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ehud Altman for useful discussions. N.S.G. is the incumbent of the Lee and William Abramowitz Professorial Chair of Biophysics and is supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) (grant no. 580/12), and Minerva Foundation research grant no. 712601. O.F. is the incumbent of the Shloimo and Michla Tomarin Career Development Chair and was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation grant 833/15, and the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 770964), and the Clore Duffield Foundation. E.F. is the incumbent of the Tom Beck Research Fellow Chair in the Physics of Complex Systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel

    Ofer Feinerman, Aviram Gelblum & Ehud Fonio

  2. Departments of Biology and Physics, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Itai Pinkoviezky

  3. Department of Chemical and Biological Physics, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel

    Nir S. Gov

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  1. Ofer Feinerman
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Feinerman, O., Pinkoviezky, I., Gelblum, A. et al. The physics of cooperative transport in groups of ants. Nature Phys 14, 683–693 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0107-y

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