A new study suggests that indeed, ants as a group behave simil | Arm Me Against Uni(n)Formation

A new study suggests that indeed, ants as a group behave similar to networks of neurons in a brain.
Rockefeller's Daniel Kronauer and postdoctoral associate Asaf Gal developed a new experimental setup to meticulously analyze decision-making in ant colonies. As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they found that when a colony evacuates due to rising temperatures, its decision is a function of both the magnitude of the heat increase and the size of the ant group.
The findings suggest that ants combine sensory information with the parameters of their group to arrive at a group response—a process similar to neural computations giving rise to decisions.
"We pioneered an approach to understand the ant colony as a cognitive-like system that perceives inputs and then translates them into behavioral outputs," says Kronauer, head of the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior. "This is one of the first steps toward really understanding how insect societies engage in collective computation."
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-ant-colonies-neural-networks-decisions.html