posted on 2023-06-08, 05:58authored byDavid Waxman
In a recent paper, M. Beekman and co-workers carried out experimental and theoretical investigations into the behaviour of a biological system consisting of a colony of Pharaoh's ants. By manipulating the colony, the foraging behaviour of the ants was, remarkably, shown to be capable of undergoing a transition between a disordered and an ordered state that was directly analogous to a phase transition in a physical system.