Individual ants don't wait around for bureaucracy and leaders, if they see something not working they stop and fix it!
In experiments, with the raiding ant Eciton Burchelli (central and south america), we find that when ants are crawling across a sloping passage, if an ant slips, she climbs back up and holds on and joins hands with a fellow ant. as this keeps happening they build a scaffold, to help other ants get accross without slipping.
No need to wait for months till a planning committee draws up plans, approve plans, hire engineers...
Funny, that humans can't do this. Does it matter that they are all sisters? Perhaps in human socieities that are more homogenous more communal work gets done without bureaucracy? that'd be something interesting to test.
These are rather large families tho, 100s of thousands of sisters. they all have one mother but i think up to 10 or 20 different fathers, i must look up to see how much mixing! do half sisters regularly work together or is there conflict? such interesting critters
twitter thread here:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1385904691284951040
research paper here:
"Individual error correction drives responsive self-assembly of army ant scaffolds"
Matthew J. Lutz, Chris R. Reid, Christopher J. Lustri, Albert B. Kao, Simon Garnier, and View Iain D. Couzin
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/17/e2013741118
wiki about Eciton burchelli here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eciton_burchellii
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