How Big is Ants Brain?
WouterUsing ant colonies as a model for understanding the evolution of brain size, a team of researchers has published findings in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. They have proposed a new hypothesis for the recent decrease in brain size. The team looked at the historical patterns of human brain evolution, and compared the findings with ant societies.
One of the major characteristics of ant societies is that they have a division of labor, which divides the cognitive load of tasks among workers of different specialties. This is a key social trait in humans. This research shows that group-level cognition selects for adaptive brain size variation.
The ant brain is divided into several small bits called ganglia. Each ganglia is responsible for controlling one part of the body. For instance, one ganglia is responsible for receiving signals from one antenna. Another ganglia receives signals from the spinal cord. When the ganglia are damaged, they cannot send signals back up to tell the brain what to do.
The ant brain is estimated to contain 250,000 nerve cells. The ant brain is tiny compared to the human brain, which is estimated to contain over 86 billion nerve cells.
While the ant brain is smaller than the brains of other vertebrates, it has remarkable computational power. This is possible because of the ant’s ability to process information in one direction. The ant brains’ ability to process signals is not specialized for human social performance, but rather it is shared among all members of the ant colony.
