Lecture G4 (2023-03-30): Identifying Information in Living Systems, Part 1

This lecture focuses on the diverse ways that ants (and slime mold) process information from their environment. We start with some basic background on ants (including their evolution from solitary wasps) and then discuss mass recruitment (one of the three main ways that ants recruit to food or candidate nest sites). We contrast the dynamic performance of Lasius niger with Pheidole megacephala and explore the suggestion that "errors" make P. megacephala better at tracking changes (using fire ants as an example that confirms this idea). We then discuss how trails are used in slime mold for enhancing exploration (instead of the exploitation case in ants) and show how slime mold can spread itself out to make decisions that compare different options in the environment. That brings us to ants that similarly spread themselves out (using linear recruitment strategies instead of the nonlinear pheromone-trail-based mass recruitment strategies) so that they can make similar deliberative decisions. We will pick up with this case in the next lecture.