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Cockroaches Make Group Decisions?
The Discovery Channel is reporting a recent study indicates that cockroaches govern themselves using simple group consultations before anything that affects the entire group. From the article: " The research determined that cockroach decision-making follows a predictable pattern that could explain group dynamics of other insects and animals, such as ants, spiders, fish and even cows. Cockroaches, Blattella Germanica, are silent creatures, save perhaps for the sound of them scurrying over a counter top. They therefore must communicate without vocalizing.
Even more significantly the researchers showed that this equilibrium was dynamic. If a bunch of atoms drifted from one partition to another then another bunch would go back the other way. It's not always the same atoms that stay in any particular partition. This demonstrates that the atoms are actually smart enough to be able to count how many atoms are leaving and entering a partition at any time.
"This could revolutionize thinking about atoms," claimed the researcher.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
What happens when you divide your shoebox into three sections? Do the molecules in the air divide themselves evenly between two of the sections, but leave the third empty? I think you missed a few details from the article. I don't think this is incredibly revolutionary, but it is still interesting. The roaches seem to attempt to maintain large but evenly sized groups. Instead of the bugs all distributing evenly among the shelters or squeezing as many as would fit into one shelter then all the rest into the second, they struck a balance between group size and eveness.
Of course the article was rather lacking in details. Was it always 25, or was it sometimes a 27/23 split?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Aren't ants monarchists? They have a queen...
My other sig is funny.
The caption for the picture in the article reads, "...the cockroaches divided themselves up perfectly." And yet the picture clearly shows at least 4 roaches that are outside of the groups. That's a strange definition of "perfectly" to me. I imagine they are often running around and so perhaps capturing a picture with them all huddled together in their groups would be difficult, but when does the scientist declare that the split was "perfect" and "complete?" Is there a time period or does "perfect" in a biological sense just mean "mostly?"
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My original analogy with gases is far better than the silly rule based thing that I wrote when jumping the gun in response to your accusing me of jumping the gun.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
Obviously, a blurb on the Discovery Channel website isn't the same as going to PNAS and reading the article for oneself, but from what little info was provided there, it doesn't seem to me that actual communication is necessarily what's going on.
In the case of parceling out a population of roaches into equal-size subpopulations, well, cockroaches stink. Er, that is, they emit chemicals into the air, and an individual cockroach may be able to detect the concentration of such a chemical as it approaches multiple sheltered areas to determine which area is occupied a little bit but not too much. The experimenter should attempt to determine what chemical accounts for such behavior and determine what concentrations are attractive or repulsive to roaches. This doesn't necessarily convey communication, because if the same chemical governs the entire behavior, then each individual cockroach isn't really conveying any information about the state of the colony in a shelter. The information results as the emergent property of having a lot of cockroaches in the same space.
In the case of roaches determining whether a cockroach is kin or not, this may be governed by similar chemicals which vary slightly among the world population of cockroaches. The same determination is made by single-celled organisms, which respond differently to the presence of certain proteins in the cell membrane. This doesn't indicate that actual communication is taking place, but rather that one cockroach is able to detect chemicals that the other cockroach would be emitting regardless of whether the two were interacting or not.
One has to be careful when deciding whether a phenomenon is explained by communication or not, because there may be many definitions of communication. Is it communication when one organism does something while oblivious to the reasons why it's doing it, and the results of that action later affect another organism? Does communication require the direct interaction of two organisms? Must the behaviors of both organisms - both emitting and receiving the signal - be neurally based, or can one or both actions be the result of a purely mechanical property of the organisms? Do the organisms have to be aware of the information they are sending or receiving (and there you bring in another ball of wax, because what constitutes awareness)?