Longhorn crazy ants or “The masters of cooperative transport”

Synopsis

Any time we have ever tried to move heavy objects together with our friends, we might have realized that cooperative transport requires effective communication. Providing enough muscles to lift the load and steering it in the correct direction are the essential requisites. Yet ants are for a long time known to be the masters of carrying massive cargoes which sometimes weight over five thousand times their bodies. Recent studies have revealed that such complicated social behavior can be mapped into a fully connected Ising model in which every individual ant is depicted by a spin degree of freedom. In this talk, I am going to review the implications of this model and I will explain how understanding of this system requires the formalism from statistical physics of interacting particles.