The use of ideas of Information Theory for studying "language" and intelligence in ants

In this review we integrate results of long term experimental study on ant "language" and intelligence which were fully based on fundamental ideas of Information Theory, such as the Shannon entropy, the Kolmogorov complexity, and the Shannon's equation connecting the length of a message ($l$) and its frequency $(p)$, i.e. $l = - \log p$ for rational communication systems. This approach, new for studying biological communication systems, enabled us to obtain the following important results on ants' communication and intelligence: i) to reveal "distant homing" in ants, that is, their ability to transfer information about remote events; ii) to estimate the rate of information transmission; iii) to reveal that ants are able to grasp regularities and to use them for "compression" of information; iv) to reveal that ants are able to transfer to each other the information about the number of objects; v) to discover that ants can add and subtract small numbers. The obtained results show that Information Theory is not only wonderful mathematical theory, but many its results may be considered as Nature laws

Red Wood Ants Display Natural Aversive Learning Differently Depending on Their Task Specialization

The adaptive benefits of individual specialization and how learning abilities correlate with task performance are still far from being well-understood. Red wood ants are characterized by their huge colonies and deep professional specialization. We hypothesized that red wood ants Formica aquilonia form aversive learning after having negative encounters with hoverfly larvae differently, depending on their task specialization. We tested this hypothesis, first, by examining whether hunters and aphid milkers learn differently to avoid the nuisance of contacts with syrphid larvae, and, second, by analyzing the difference between learning in “field” and laboratory-reared (naïve) foragers. During the first interaction with the syrphid larva in their lives the naïve foragers showed a significantly higher level of aggressiveness than the members of a natural colony. Naïve foragers applied the “mortal grip,” “prolonged bites,” and “nibbling” toward the enemy with a significantly higher frequency, whereas members of both “field” groups behaved more carefully and tried to avoid encounters with the larva. The aphid milkers, who had a negative experience of interaction with the larva, being “glued” with its viscous secretion, behaved much less aggressively in the follow-up experiments after 10 min and even 3 days, thus exhibiting the shaping of both short- and long-term memories. However, both “field” hunters and naïve foragers demonstrated no signs of aversive learning. These data provide some new insights into the relationship between task specialization and learning performance in ants. Given our previous results, we speculate that scouts and aphid milkers are the most cognitively gifted specialists in red wood ants, whereas hunters and guards are rather brave than smart

Individual specialization, learning and information transfer in social hymenopterans: experiments, ideas and hypotheses

Peer reviewe

Information Theory Opens New Dimensions in Experimental Studies of Animal Behaviour and Communication

Over the last 40–50 years, ethology has become increasingly quantitative and computational. However, when analysing animal behavioural sequences, researchers often need help finding an adequate model to assess certain characteristics of these sequences while using a relatively small number of parameters. In this review, I demonstrate that the information theory approaches based on Shannon entropy and Kolmogorov complexity can furnish effective tools to analyse and compare animal natural behaviours. In addition to a comparative analysis of stereotypic behavioural sequences, information theory can provide ideas for particular experiments on sophisticated animal communications. In particular, it has made it possible to discover the existence of a developed symbolic “language” in leader-scouting ant species based on the ability of these ants to transfer abstract information about remote events

ABOUT DEGENERATING PARABOLIC EQUATIONS WITH NON-LINEAR FUNCTIONS OF CHANGING KIND

The work is devoted to the investigation of the non-linear effects for the implicitly degenerating parabolic equations containing the power functions with variable indices from solution and its products. The conditions of the presence of the global heat front, heat localization, instantenous compression of the heated area and also total and internal stabilization for finite time for mathematical models of the heat propagation in the significant-heterogeneous and significant-non-stationary non-linear media have been found. The conditions of the heat explosion presence and absence in the non-linear media with significant-non-stationary sources both internal and concentrated on the boundary have been specified also. The examples certifying about accuracy of a majority of the conditions have been specified. The work results can find application in the theory of equations with partial products, mechanics of the continual media, mathematical biophysics. The method of additive functions and also the method of energetical inequalities have been usedAvailable from VNTIC / VNTIC - Scientific & Technical Information Centre of RussiaSIGLERURussian Federatio

Ecological Mechanisms of Integration of Ant Communities

Available from VNTIC / VNTIC - Scientific & Technical Information Centre of RussiaSIGLERURussian Federatio

Catalog Learning: Carabid Beetles Learn to Manipulate with Innate Coherent Behavioral Patterns

One of the most fascinating problems in comparative psychology is how learning contributes to solving specific functional problems in animal life, and which forms of learning our species shares with non-human animals. Simulating a natural situation of territorial conflicts between predatory carabids and red wood ants in field and laboratory experiments, we have revealed a relatively simple and quite natural form of learning that has been overlooked. We call it catalog learning, the name we give to the ability of animals to establish associations between stimuli and coherent behavioral patterns (patterns consist of elementary motor acts that have a fixed order). Instead of budgeting their motor acts gradually, from chaotic to rational sequences in order to learn something new, which is characteristic for a conditioning response, animals seem to be “cataloguing” their repertoire of innate coherent behavioral patterns in order to optimize their response to a certain repetitive event. This form of learning can be described as “stimulus-pattern” learning. In our experiments four “wild” carabid species, whose cognitive abilities have never been studied before, modified their behavior in a rather natural manner in order to avoid damage from aggressive ants. Beetles learned to select the relevant coherent behavioral patterns from the set of seven patterns, which are common to all four species and apparently innate. We suggest that this form of learning differs from the known forms of associative learning, and speculate that it is quite universal and can be present in a wide variety of species, both invertebrate and vertebrate. This study suggests a new link between the concepts of cognition and innateness

How to study ants. Numerical competence using their own communicative means and applying ideas of information theory

The main point of proposed approach to study ants cognitive abilities is that our experiments provide a situation in which insects have to transmit information quantitatively known to the experimentalist in order to obtain food. One may estimate some properties of ant intelligence by measuring complexity of tasks they solve in order to pass definite pieces of information from scouts to foragers.Our previous experiments, basing on ideas of Information Theory, have shown that ants are able to memorize and transmit messages concerning sequence of turns toward a trough of syrup and use the simplest regularities to compress the information. To reveal counting and number related skills, we suggested red wood ants Formica polyctena to transmit information on the number and coordinates of objects. One of the experimental set-ups consisted of a tree trunk with branches that ended in empty troughs, except for one which was filled with syrup. Another set-up consisted of a lattice which simulated Cartesian coordinates. The foragers of F. polyctena were separated into teams of 5-8 individuals , each with one scout. All laboratory ants were marked with coloured labels. To start the experiment, an ant scout was placed at the randomly numbered trough containing food and then returned to the nest on its own. The duration of the contact between foragers and the scout was measured. Then we removed the scout and the foragers had to search for the food by themselves. The experiments were so devised as to eliminate all possible ways that may help to find food, except for distant homing. It turns out that the ants are able to count within several tens, and transmit this information to their nestmates. The analysis of time duration of ants contacts enable us to create a hypothesis of how they use numbers and coordinates in their communication. We suppose that only a few highly social ant species use such a complex communication system based on cognitive processes. At the same time, we believe that the experimental schemes described can be used to study the communication systems and numerical competence of other animals