Could ants' nests hold the secret to reducing traffic congestion on the 405 Freeway?
build their nests that could be useful for designing more efficient human transportation systems.
"Ants deal with the same issues we deal with when it comes to living in crowded spaces," said Sean O'Fallon, a UCLA doctoral student in ecology and The researchers examined four common foraging strategies used by ants. In some species, individual ants hunt for food. In others, an ant brings food to the nest as a means of recruiting other ants to accompany it to the food source. Ants can also form a continuous trail between the food source and the nest that can persist for months. Or they can leave a pheromone trail that members of the colony can follow in large numbers—a phenomenon the researchers called"mass recruitment.
However, the scientists also expected that nests for the mass recruitment foragers would have greater"network density"—meaning larger numbers of connections among the chambers—than nests built by other species. Greater network density, the scientists reasoned, would help facilitate more movement of ants and resources throughout the nest.
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