Groups of ants seem to be smarter than the sum of their parts. But for groups of humans, that’s not always the case.
In lab experiments, scientists gave longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) and people the same puzzle. The goal was to get a weirdly shaped object through a tight maze along as short a path as possible.
Ofer Feinerman and his colleagues ran this two-species tournament at the Weizmann Institute of Science. That’s in Rehovot, Israel. The setup offered a rare chance to directly compare problem-solving in two vastly different creatures, Feinerman says. “Another motivation to do it [was] just for the fun and funniness of it.”
These ant-ics did yield some surprising results, which the researchers shared last December. The work appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
