Weaver ant
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 A weaver ant in combat attitude, Pamalican, Philippines.
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Weaver ants (genus Oecophylla) are social insects belonging to the ant family, known for their communication and nest building behaviour. Weaver ants are social insects that have complex bio-chemical communication and make elaborate nests out of living tree-leaves. Weaver ants are found in the tropical forests of Africa and southeast Asia. They are colored a shade of red and are known for their painful, irritating sting.
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[edit] Complex communication in nest building
Weaver ants form the most elaborate communicative organization in the insect world. They form complex organizations through their simple intelligence to emerge as an elaborate social structure. At first the queen ant lays her eggs among tree leaves while the worker ants engage in building the nest. This emergent ant society helps in building the nest by weaving together living tree leaves. This is done by first forming ant chains that hold together leaves and then manipulating the ant larva to produce silk in order to glue the tree leaves. Thus the ant colony emerges with the queen in the centre of the nest whose only purpose is to lay eggs while female ants engage in building the nest. The entire nest building activity is a very distributed process involving every ant.
[edit] Emergent ant organization and artificial intelligence
The emergence of complex organization among weaver ants, from simple biological intelligence is a model for social communication processes in organizations and artificial intelligence. It is extensively modeled and studied in the emergence of complex behavior from simple rules in diverse disciplines of generative sciences. The weaver ants emergent organization and eating behaviour is applied as natural bio-control of pests in orchards, where they are introduced on trees in order to build nests and act as natural pest control.
 Weaver ants collaborating in attacking a larger insect |
 Weaver ants nest |
 Weaver ants nest on a Mango tree |
 Weaver ants foraging on lime sap, Rayong, Thailand |
[edit] Selected bibliography
- C. Ronald Kube and Hong Zhang.(1993) Collective Robotics: From Social Insects to Robots, Adaptive Behavior, 2(2):189-219.
- Huang, H. T. and Pei Yang. (1987). Ancient Cultured Citrus Ant Used as Biological Control Agent BioScience 37(9):665-671.
Bonabeau, E, Dorigo, M & Theraulaz, G. "Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems" NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
