The Economics of ANT COLONIES: 10 Money Lessons from the Insect World
–By Sushma Pradhan
Ants are good citizens, they place group interests first. - Clarence Day
Ants build hills that last for years and prosper for generations too. How do we build our house instead? Like the Grasshoppers, in fact most of us believe in living a life of a grasshopper. I am sure you must have heard the story of the ant and the grasshopper.
In case no then I will let you know in a nutshell. The ant slogs day after day in the scorching heat to prepare for the upcoming winters, on the other hand the grasshopper, hops, and jumps, enjoys, and thinks that the ant is a fool.
Now when the winter is here, the ants are happy and gay, whereas the grasshopper is sad and stiff in the deathbed, due to severe cold. We humans at times, tend to behave as the grasshoppers and forget that the future may be bleak and gloomy. We tend to care for the future and live only for the present.
We tend to believe that ‘I am the one, I rule the world.’ I would say incorrect, how very incorrect. Have you looked at the ants minutely? They are tiny but yes! Definitely not dumb. There are ample of lessons to be learnt from this tiny creature.
1. United we stand: The first lesson that we definitely need to learn from the world of ant is the unity. The collective behavior that is so much a part of the ant world is a successful image of a self-organization in a large-scale. This trait of the ants help them a great deal in finding food and help them supply with the food that can suffice their entire colony, throughout the trying times.
2. Adaptation to the environment: The colonies of ants are very quick in adapting themselves to their environment. In a condition where one or more ants fail to carry out their duties, there is no mismanagement of work. The most important point however here remains the least intrusion of the top-down control.
3. Logistics: The natural application of the ant world is the food-furnishing algorithm. A small example with a vast difference by adapting the ant logistics was tremendously felt by the Southwest Airlines. This airline used the ant intelligence to restructure their cargo operations. On following the ant structure, the company saved around ten million dollars a year. Their smart moves made them cut down on freight transfer rates and slash the workload for people carrying cargo. The result was, the airline still made money even if the plane was partially loaded.
4. Traffic Rules: The ants are known to adhere to strict traffic laws. However, in the ant world, there are no traffic violations, and there are no issues of tickets either.
Because, number one, such circumstances does not arise here at all and number two, the ants do not believe in violation. A study carried out by the Princeton University of New Jersey, researchers have revealed that the ants create lanes, which efficiently manage and flows the swarm of ants quickly.
The ant use pheromones to create their path and follow a rule that is simple and socially acceptable in their world. Theirs is three-lane traffic, the two outside lane for the outgoing ants and the middle one for the returning ones.
It is time that we humans learnt a lesson or two on traffic rules from the ants. We all know rules are to be followed but once when we are stuck in the traffic jam then, then it is, Traffic Rules! Huh!
5. Its Ant and not Aint: That is right there is no place for ‘I’ in the ant world. Be it for traffic or any other job, genetically they have inherited the behavior of moving continuously. For the ants, it is very important to do their job and mostly importantly do it well too. The colony’s benefit is their target and focus and perhaps this is the most important trait in them that drives them to do their work with utmost sincerity. Nevertheless, with us, we have to accept that we do tend to be selfish at times.
6. A never-ending quest: If one observes ants minutely, one will find that they overcome various obstacles to reach for their food and bring it back to the colony. Similarly, noticing these finer details of the ant to fight every hardship through their undying effort, many software companies have developed highly sensitive software that not just copes with the varied conditions but is also fast, automatic than the traditional ones.
If ants are such busy workers, how come they find time to go to all the picnics? - Marie Dressler
7. A highly effective networking: It is so right, they sniff, and they invade and they are all over, crawling and feasting over the food, which they merrily drag away from right under our nose. Apart from the menace, have you ever thought how is it they sniff the food so soon? Ants efficiently use the method of tracking their food back through the help of pheromone, a chemical that attracts other ants. The ant that returns first to the nest informs the other ants about the food and thereby retreats to the spot by the help of the pheromone marked path. In fact, this is a strong computing system.
8. Telecommunications: Eric Bonabeau, a leader who has excelled in the field of swarm intelligence believes in applying the ant concept to the human world of problems such as telecommunications routing.
Bonabeau says that routing is essential because mostly the large-scale telecommunication networks are not fully connected for cost effectiveness, therefore the messages have to be guided to make them reach their destination. Instead, he started using virtual ants and made them leave virtual pheromone at the nodes of the network to optimize the routes used by the message. This technique in fact created wonders to the telecommunications.
9. Self-organization: Human beings need to learn this quality and earn from it too. We tend to have a centralized mindset. If you check out the way ant build highways, bridges, nests, chains and furthermore even complex activities like the defense mechanism, foraging, cleaning and nest care, it is completely different and amazing, this is so because they are self-organized and carry out their work through interactions, both direct and indirect.
10. Constructively Strong: Now let us look at their constructive excellence, ants are known to build anthills that last generation after generation, whereas we humans build a home that hardly last a generation.
The ants may be tiny but their feats are amazing. If you destroy their nest and force them migrate to a new place, the ants will do so efficiently. However, the key point here is, in case you repeat your act of destroying the nest again, you will find that this time they are not only efficient but also quicker than before in building one.
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