Ants
Course Description
Collective behavior, widespread in nature, operates without central control, using interactions among the participants. Ant colonies provide great opportunities to learn about collective behavior. Colonies consist of one or more reproductive females, called 'queens' although they do not direct the behavior of the rest of the colony; the rest of the ants you see walking around are sterile female workers. Local interactions among ants allow colonies to adjust to changing conditions. Ants as a group are enormously diverse, with more than 15,000 species in every habitat on earth, and they show very diverse forms of collective behavior reflecting different ecological conditions. The course will include discussion of research about ant colony behavior, ecology, and evolution. Students will do a research project on campus involving observation and hypothesis testing; and, for the technologically-inclined, some simple simulations based on agent-based modeling.
Meet the Instructor: Deborah Gordon
"My lab studies collective behavior in ants and analogies with other systems - see my lab's website. Undergraduate researchers are welcome in the lab, both for projects on campus during the academic year and in summer field work. The class project for our seminar will extend previous projects by undergraduates in the lab, e.g., 'Tree Preference and Temporal Activity Patterns for a Native Ant Community in an Urbanized California Woodland,' and 'Foraging behavior and locomotion of the invasive Argentine ant from winter aggregations.' Did you know that every tree on campus is labeled with a number? Because we know which ant species were seen on which trees in previous work, we can go back and see how things have changed, to learn how local interactions within and between colonies create ecological patterns."
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