1、 最权威的国际教育服务平台 资料来源：教育优选 http:/ intelligence: Ants and brains neuronsSTANFORD - An individual ant is not very bright, but ants in a colony, operating as a collective, do remarkable things.A single neuron in the human brain can respond only to what the neurons connected to it are doing, but all of the
2、m together can be Immanuel Kant.That resemblance is why Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford University assistant professor of biological sciences, studies ants.“Im interested in the kind of system where simple units together do behave in complicated ways,“ she said.No one gives orders in an ant colony, yet
3、each ant decides what to do next.For instance, an ant may have several job descriptions. When the colony discovers a new source of food, an ant doing housekeeping duty may suddenly become a forager. Or if the colonys territory size expands or contracts, patroller ants change the shape of their recon
4、naissance pattern to conform to the new realities. Since no one is in charge of an ant colony - including the misnamed “queen,“ which is simply a breeder - how does each ant decide what to do?This kind of undirected behavior is not unique to ants, Gordon said. How do birds flying in a flock know whe
5、n to make a collective right turn? All anchovies and other schooling fish seem to turn in unison, yet no one fish is the leader.Gordon studies harvester ants in Arizona and, both in the field and in her lab, the so-called Argentine ants that are ubiquitous to coastal California.Argentine ants came t
6、o Louisiana in a sugar shipment in 1908. They were driven out of the Gulf states by the fire ant and invaded California, where they have displaced most of the native ant species. One of the things Gordon is studying is how they did so. No one has ever seen an ant war involving the 最权威的国际教育服务平台 资料来源：
7、教育优选 http:/ species and the native species, so its not clear whether they are quietly aggressive or just find ways of taking over food resources and territory.The Argentine ants in her lab also are being studied to help her understand how they change behavior as the size of the space they are explor
8、ing varies.“The ants are good at finding new places to live in and good at finding food,“ Gordon said. “Were interested in finding out how they do it.“Her ants are confined by Plexiglas walls and a nasty glue-like substance along the tops of the boards that keeps the ants inside. She moves the walls
9、 in and out to change the arena and videotapes the ants movements. A computer tracks each ant from its image on the tape and reads its position so she has a diagram of the ants activities.The motions of the ants confirm the existence of a collective.“A colony is analogous to a brain where there are
10、lots of neurons, each of which can only do something very simple, but together the whole brain can think. None of the neurons can think ant, but the brain can think ant, though nothing in the brain told that neuron to think ant.“For instance, ants scout for food in a precise pattern. What happens wh
11、en that pattern no longer fits the circumstances, such as when Gordon moves the walls?“Ants communicate by chemicals,“ she said. “Thats how they mostly perceive the world; they dont see very well. They use their antennae to smell. So to smell something, they have to get very close to it.“The best po
12、ssible way for ants to find everything - if you think of the colony as an individual that is trying to do this - is to have an ant everywhere all the time, because if it doesnt happen close to an ant, theyre not going to know about it. Of course, there are not enough ants in the colony to do that, s
13、o somehow the ants have to move around in a pattern that allows them to cover space efficiently.“Keeping in mind that no one is in charge of a colony and that there is no central plan, how do the ants adjust their reconnaissance if their territory expands or shrinks?“No ant told them, OK, guys, if t
14、he arena is 20 by 20. . . . Somehow there has to be some rule that individual ants use in deciding to change the shape of their paths so they cover the areas effectively. I think that that rule is the rate in which they bump into each other.“最权威的国际教育服务平台 资料来源：教育优选 http:/ more crowded they are, the m
15、ore often each ant will bump into another ant. If the area of their territory is expanded, the frequency of contact decreases. Perhaps, Gordon thinks, each ant has a threshold for normality and adjusts its path shape depending on how often the number of encounters exceeds or falls short of that thre
16、shold.If the territory shrinks, the number of contacts increases and the ant alters its search pattern. If it expands, contact decreases and it alters the pattern a different way.In the Arizona harvester ants, Gordon studies tasks besides patrolling. Each ant has a job.“I divide the tasks into four:
17、 foraging, nest maintenance, midden piling refuse, including husks of seeds and patrolling - patrollers are the ones that come out first in the morning and look for food. The foragers go where the patrollers find food.“The colony has about eight different foraging paths. Every day it uses several of
18、 them. The patrollers go out first on the trails and they attract each other when they find food. By the end of an hours patrolling, most patrollers are on just a few trails. . . . All the foragers have to do is go where there are the most patrollers.“Each ant has its prescribed task, but the ants c
19、an switch tasks if the collective needs it. An ant on housekeeping duty will decide to forage. No one told it to do so and Gordon and other entomologists dont know how that happens.“No ant can possibly know how much food everybody is collecting, how many foragers are needed,“ she said. “An ant has t
20、o have very simple rules that tell it, OK, switch and start foraging. But an ant cant assess globally how much food the colony needs.“Ive done perturbation experiments in which I marked ants according to what task theyre doing on a given day. The ants that were foraging for food were green, those th
21、at were cleaning the nest were blue and so on. Then I created some new situation in the environment; for example, I create a mess that the nest maintenance workers have to clean up or Ill put out extra food that attracts more foragers.“It turns out that ants that were marked doing a certain task one
22、 day switch to do a different task when conditions change.“Of about 8,000 species of ants, only about 10 percent have been studied thus far.最权威的国际教育服务平台 资料来源：教育优选 http:/ hard to generalize anything about the behavior of ants,“ Gordon said. “Most of what we know about ants is true of a very, very small number of species compared to the number of species out there.“
