In France, we lose an average of 23 hours per year in traffic jams. In Paris, this number goes up to 65 hours and in Los Angeles to 104 hours. The observation is simple: the traffic jams are wasting time, money, and are bad for the environment. But in nature, animals that live in groups evolve, them, with great fluidity. To understand why, researchers at the Center for Research on Animal Cognition (CNRS / University Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier), the University of Arizona and Adelaide studied one of the best socially organized living species: ants. Their results were published Tuesday, October 22 in eLife magazine.
In an anthill indeed, everyone has a role to play. The workers take care of the supply of materials and food, the nurses take care of the eggs laid by the queen, herself involved in all the strategic and political decisions, and the warriors protect their sisters from the various dangers to which they might be exposed. to be confronted. A millimeter organization, where all the individuals intersect to accomplish their tasks, but without ever slowing down.
No traffic jams even in case of high density
For their study, the researchers filmed 170 experiments aimed at varying the traffic of ant parties in search of food, to try to cause traffic jams. Bridges, narrow tunnels ... Nothing has done. Even when the density of the ants is doubled, they do not slow down, on the contrary. The more they are, the more their speed increases and the more the traffic is fluid! But to reach such a level of circulation, "organization" and "communication" are the watchwords. Ants are indeed able to exchange information with pheromones, a means of communication just as complex as human language. They can, among other things, indicate new routes to their peers when the main path is occupied and direct them to other sources of food if necessary.
A model that could save us time, thanks to "biomimicry", which aims to inspire the living to facilitate our daily lives and to better use collective intelligence. Even if humans are not subject to the same organizational logics, more individualistic. "While ant traffic has many similarities with the movement of pedestrians and vehicles, it is also based on fundamental differences," say the researchers, starting with the existence of the Highway Code. In the case of human traffic jams, cars of the future may still be able to communicate traffic density information to each other and offer other routes to drivers. All thanks to the ants!