• Question: why do you work on ants?

    Asked by lukemoss to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 12 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Susanna Martin

      Susanna Martin answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I don’t work on ants, but my boss told me about a really interesting project the other day. There is a theory in psychology called social facilitation, it basically means that if you are doing something easy and people are watching you then you will perform better but if it is hard you will perform worse. What is interesting is that they found the same thing with cockroaches! If you put a cockroach in a hard maze and it can see other cockroaches watching it then it wont perform very well but if you hide them from view it will succeed. Weird huh! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation

    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      I think is maybe a question for one of the other scientists, I don’t work with ants but I do think they are pretty cool! Observing them has taught us a lot about the way that large groups of units work together which has helped understand something about brain cells and how they communicate, and also large groups of people. Here’s a video from a professor here at my university in Bristol that talks about ants and bees compared to neurons!

    • Photo: Michael Craig

      Michael Craig answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      I’m afraid I don’t know much about ants, sorry.

    • Photo: Ben Brilot

      Ben Brilot answered on 15 Mar 2013:

      Hi Luke, I’m afraid I don’t work on ants either. I do know a fair bit about ants though, so if you have a specific question in mind then let me know. The main reason why people study ants, by the way, is to understand how a very complex social society works: how do they communicate with each other, how does a big nest of ants come to a single decision (like where to set up a new home), why do workers never have their own offspring, but raise sisters instead etc.

    • Photo: James Stovold

      James Stovold answered on 18 Mar 2013:

      I study the behaviour of ants as social insects. This is because there are many similarities between an ant colony and the brain. For example, individually, ants have very limited sensing abilities (they can basically only smell), but when they are in a colony, the colony shows some very intelligent behaviour (such as responding to predators, searching for food etc.). This is very similar to the brain — the individual neurons have incredibly limited abilities, but when they are wired together in a brain, the whole system behaves in a very intelligent way. Because of this, I work with both ants and brains to see if we can get robots to do the same — so if we have very simple robots, can we get them to work together to do something intelligent.

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