I recently drew a series of ant cartoons to illustrate Eugene Eric Kim’s talk on collective intelligence; see the slide deck here.

In conceptual research, I came across multiple references to the trippy trivia that an ant colony is the neuronal equivalent of a human brain. Of course, number of neurons is a pretty one-dimensional way to assess intelligence. In the collective, ant intelligence is recognizable in the structures they create, cooperative survival behaviors (e.g., ant rafts), farming behaviors, the familiar list goes on. But I was amazed to learn, among other things, that teaching by individuals has been observed in the form of tandem running.

Source for numbers of neurons: Wikipedia: List of animals by number of neurons.

originally posted on words & design