Ants

Collective behavior, widespread in nature, operates without central control, using interactions among the participants. Ant colonies provide great opportunities to learn about collective behavior. Colonies consist of one or more reproductive females, which although they are called 'queens' do not direct the behavior of the rest of the colony, comprised of sterile female workers. Ants as a group are enormously diverse, with more than 14,000 species in every habitat on earth, and they show very diverse forms of collective behavior reflecting different ecological conditions. The course will include discussion of research about ant colony behavior, ecology, and evolution; a research project on campus involving observation and hypothesis testing; and, for the technologically-inclined, some simple simulations based on agent-based modeling.