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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.
Not only can they communicate, but they also have a staunch work ethic. They've been known to make every attempt to get to work on time regardless of whatever transformations may happen to them over night.
... er ... smell to him.
Poor Gregor, no matter how hard he released pheromones, his parents just wouldn't listen
My work here is dung.
That explains all those committees and cabinets then that politicians constantly set up. Only cockroaches are obviously much more effective in their efforts.
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In the X-Files episode "War of The Coprophages" cockroaches are seen to group together to murder people. The character Dr. Berenbaum (based on the University of Illinois entomologist) suggests that it is actually swarms of flying cockroaches that are responsible for most UFO sightings (they generate an electro-static field which can be illuminated dependent on atmospheric conditions). In one of the scenes, a cockroach that escaped can be seen crawling over the camera, making it appear that the viewer's television has become infested. Though the shot was not planned, the producers decided to leave it in the episode.
Cockroaches have regular staff meetings in order to create synergy, redefine their core competencies, implement new strategems, and satisfy shareholders.
Termites can do it too, but they hold theirs inside a plank of wood, hence the term "board meeting."
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
This is new to our understanding of roaches, but the article doesn't realy go in to what's amazing about this. Ants are pretty well understood, an ant colony is an aggregated indirect fitness machine. Since all the female offspring of the queen are related to eachother by 3/4 (why? because they're way cool!!), and the worker caste is sterile, they promote the fitness of their sisters who will become queens themselves and leave the colony, reproduce, and therefore replicate their sister's genes. This genetic system is called haplodiploidy. Roaches on the other hand, are diploids like you and I. The genetic incentive for the cooperation that we see in ants is just not there in roaches. Instead, what the roaches are doing is more similar to reciprocal altruism.
from the article: After much "consultation," through antenna probing, touching and more, the cockroaches divided themselves up perfectly within the shelters. For example, if 50 insects were placed in a dish with three shelters, each with a capacity for 40 bugs, 25 roaches huddled together in the first shelter, 25 gathered in the second shelter, and the third was left vacant.
A completely selfish roach would say "screw you, I'm not going to that other house, I want to stay where everybody else is!". But because other roaches are willing to go to the second house so is any extraordinarily selfish roach. So this is an evolutionarily stable strategy. This challenges how smart we think roaches are. They are truly making decisions. It's not that some of the roaches are genetically predisposed to being the roach who decides not to stay with everyone else while other's lack that genetic predisposition. If this were the case the numbers of each group when they divide would never be even.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
It's interesting to see other animals, and now possibly insects, demonstrate intelligent behaviour and communicate with each other. Wether they use body language, chemical emmissions, or sign language with their antenna, I'd say it looks like we keep finding intelligent life on our own planet.
But, if I find one in my house I'm still going to squish it.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
cockroach decision-making follows a predictable pattern
/. for validating what I knew all along.
So some of my past managers really were dumber than cockroaches? I knew it! Thank you
Developers: We can use your help.
I, for one, welcome our new silent Big Brother cockroach overlords.
Poor Scarface. He didn't realize those cockroaches he was going to bury were colluding together against him.
Words of wisdom, I guess.
Why I feel like a cockroach after a meeting. :P
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
... welcome our new organizational management overlords.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
No Politics topic?
They therefore must communicate without vocalizing.
Is this still a matter of debate?
When I was studying Entomology 15 years ago (egad!), the the leading theory for insect communication is that that they communicated primarily using scents and vibrations on the ground in the air. They can hear, but not necessarily vocalize.
This has been studied extensively in ants & termites -- As far as I know, this is still the leading theory.
It's hard to prove, because "smells" are hard to detect.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Is that why I keep finding my Raid cans with the nozzle broken off? Damn bugs!
As the article is scarce on pics, here some more pictures of the cockroaches meeting up before making decisions. :)
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.
And similiar to the Republican-dominated Congress.
You realize the article was about how cockroaches get together, communicate effectively, and do what is good for the entire group, right? That means you either completely mistrolled for the slashdot groupthink, or you are the bravest Republican in the history of slashdot. Either way, I fear a karma-punishment in your future.
Correct. And don't forget that the metaphor for a Democrat-controlled Congress is pigs at a trough. They do vocalize.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
if it wasn't, I would not be out of gas in my car after driving PAST a gas station, for if atoms truly want to be free, I'd have suddenly gained a half tank of fuel.
unless, of course, the atoms are taking orders from the cockroaches. we don't get along.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I would have liked to have seen how these groups split up. Mark half, those in the same community group, with some sort of colored agent for distinction purposes. Also attach numbers to their backs for singular ID.
Are certain roaches more active than others in the "communicating" phase? Do they exhibit "Leadership?" Do the roaches split themselves based on swarm? Is there a consistent distribution of the numbers inside the shelters?
CR1: Is that the sound of a light-switch I hear?
CR2: Yes!
CR3: What should we do?
CR4: Run!
CR5: Do I have a second?
Maybe not!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
that is a powerful deduction. I don't know if i would have ever drawn that conclusion, but I guess that's why I don't study insects.
You can't hear it because they're texting!
'tis but a scratch.
Well, how else are politicians going to get their laws passed?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Instead of using EGroupware or PHPGroupware, we should just start using using silent communications like cockroaches...
....HEY!"
"...So does that mean I'm #1, or
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Congresspeople Make Group Decisions
March 30, 2006 — Congresspeople govern themselves in a very simple democracy where each insect has equal standing and group consultations precede decisions that affect the entire group, indicates a new study.
The research determined that congressperson decision-making follows a predictable pattern that could explain group dynamics of other insects and animals, such as ants, spiders, fish and even cows.
"Congresspeople use chemical and tactile communication with each other," said José Halloy, who co-authored the research, which is outlined in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "They can also use vision."
Halloy, a scientist in the Department of Social Ecology at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, added, "When they encounter each other they recognize if they belong to the same colony thanks to their antennas that are 'nooses,' that is, sophisticated olfactory organs that are very sensitive."
Halloy tested congressperson group behavior by placing the insects in a dish that contained three shelters. The test was to see how the Congresspeople would divide themselves into the shelters.
After much "consultation," through antenna probing, touching and more, the Congresspeople divided themselves up perfectly within the shelters. For example, if 50 insects were placed in a dish with three shelters, each with a capacity for 40 bugs, 25 congresspeople huddled together in the first shelter, 25 gathered in the second shelter, and the third was left vacant.
When the researchers altered this setup so that it had three shelters with a capacity for more than 50 insects, all of the Congresspeople moved into the first "house."
Halloy and his colleagues found that a balance existed between cooperation and competition for resources.
He explained to Discovery News, "Congresspeople are gregarious insects (that) benefit from living in groups. It increases their reproductive opportunities, (promotes) sharing of resources like shelter or food, prevents desiccation by aggregating more in dry environments, etc. So what we show is that these behavioral models allow them to optimize group size."
The models are so predictable that they could explain other insect and animal group behaviors, such as how some fish and bugs divide themselves up so neatly into subgroups, and how certain herding animals make simple decisions that do not involve leadership.
David Sumpter, an Oxford University zoologist, told Discovery News that the new study "is an excellent paper."
Sumpter continued, "It is important because it looks both at the mechanisms underlying decision-making by animals and how those mechanisms produce a distribution of animals amongst resource sites that optimizes their individual fitness. Much previous research has concentrated on either mechanisms or optimality at the expense of the other."
For congresspeople, it seems, cooperation comes naturally.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
So you are saying our Nuclear program...is bugged?
Never confuse volume with power.
Researchers find that unlike roaches, human make a single group decision on who will make all the group decisions every 4 years.
that the last girl who ever visited slashdot was on 4th April who read Roaches who make group decisions
Striving to be common...
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.
Now if we could just get them involved with a religious cult that would inspire them to all commit mass suicide... Roach kool-aid anyone?
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
correct me if i am wrong, but isnt a cokroach Periplaneta americana?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
That means you either completely mistrolled for the slashdot groupthink, or you are the bravest Republican in the history of slashdot.
Hrm? Republicans are the majority in congress? All that irresponsible budget spending and big government had me fooled for a bit.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
You're my hero.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
cockroaches govern themselves using simple group consultations before anything that affects the entire group
:)
I've seen them make this decision, repeatedly! My wife walks around outside wearing sandals during the warm summer months, and you can clearly hear one the roaches (sight unseen) go "hey check out the blonde chick with her toes hanging out! Lets go make her scream bloody murder!!!" and then 2 or three come out of nowhere and run over towards her general direction and do exactly that.
No science needed; it's a routine observation
2 pieces of cerial hit the floor, one a cheerio, the other a peanut butter captin-crunch.. the teams deliberates.. even though the CC is further from the hole in the wall and may cause more loss, in the end its worth more than the cheerio.
Kill your TV
After much "consultation," through antenna probing, touching and more, the cockroaches divided themselves up perfectly within the shelters. For example, if 50 insects were placed in a dish with three shelters, each with a capacity for 40 bugs, 25 roaches huddled together in the first shelter, 25 gathered in the second shelter, and the third was left vacant.
Now from this, we can deduce that the cockroaches, after armageddon, will choose to live in mansions and luxury apartments, and stay clear of public housing.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
there was this one roach, strutting across the counter alone, singing, "I've got to be meeeeeee - I've got to be ..." .
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I knew thoose little bastards were smarter than they let on to be !
I watched roaches in my house, err lab, for 6 months with no funding & all I could determine was that they don't walk backwards but they can turn on a dime (literally).
I'd try to cook somthing on the stove, err, bunson burner, one would sit on the ceiling looking like it was watching me then when I would look over at the fly swatter, that one & its' buddies would dive-bomb my lunch, err, experiment before I could get to the swatter. Like little raptors.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
The mod system works, right?
Group consultations? Decision making? (MBA major?) Fancy words used in context of a roach , but what is the point? Roaches have attenae's like every other bug (and silent like every other bug) and EVERYONE knows they communicate via radio waves.... duh....
Given an appropriately-complex apparatus, could one devise a device to utilize the computing power of cockroaches for opimization problems?
The potential of this cock-puter is mind-blowing...
Last post!
In the prophetic words of starcraft, Evolution Complete!
=\
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
After all these years of humans cranking out 90+ db sounds, and setting our volume to 11, maybe they decided not to worry so much about that bit, and concentrate on just replacing us.
Their cunning plot to remove the world's pirate fish and create global warming is working really well, don't you think?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I can just hear my boss now, "Why can't you guys agree upon a plan of action! Hell! Even cockroaches can make group decisions!!"
Cockroaches, Blattella Germanica, are silent creatures, save perhaps for the sound of them scurrying over a counter top. They therefore must communicate without vocalizing.
I never would have guessed that! Thank God for these clever scientists!
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
What are you talking about? Blattella Germanica totally deserves both capital letters!! It's the best science fiction show since Babylon 5, even if they did make Starbuck a girl!!
Why are you looking at me like that?
And let's not forget about the budget surplus under Clinton.
OK, so now let's do this experiment again, this time with 51 roaches. Will there be 17 in each of the three shelters? What if we reduce shelter capacity to 30 roaches? or 25?
As another poster has suggested this may have less to do with intelligent decisions and more to do with scripted behavior: if roach population here is above X, branch to new location. The threshold X may be set by a number of factors such as total perceived population, observed population in the current shelter, etc. Tweaking shelter size, number of roaches, and other conditions in a controlled way may reveal the decision motivators and help to discern if there is some consensus at work or if it's just a survival script. Just as roaches avoid light because they have evolved to recognize it leaves them detectable and therefore vulnerable, they may scorn large groupings to avoid being wiped out by the loss of a single population center.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
...cranium rats...
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
Now, we all know telescopes allow us to see distant objects. But what if we want to smell distant objects? Well now we can! Thanks to my new invention ... the Smellescope. The odour travels past this coffee stain here, around the olive pit and into this cigar burn. And this appears to be a doodle of myself as a cowboy. But the Smellescope is brilliant, I tell you! Think of the astronomical odours you'll smell thanks to me.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
You realize the article was about how cockroaches get together, communicate effectively, and do what is good for the entire group, right?
Yes, and Congress typically gets together, communicates effectively, and does what's best for the entire... Congress.
So, yes, they're just like cockroaches: as a group, they generally do what's best for themselves. Note that the article didn't indicate that the behavior generally benefited other cockroaches outside the clique.
In fact, the only exception I take to the OP is that it singles out the current Republican congresses self-interest and corruption when one need go back only to the beginning of Clinton's term to find an equally degraded Democratic congress.
In fact, the current congressional makeup is primarily a backlash from the corruption of the previous democratic congress, just like it seems likely that the democrats will now take over again as a result of all the republican corruption over the last six to eight years.
I guess that at least American voters aren't like cockroaches then. They rarely do what's best for the group...
From now on, I buy only Intel.
Which was primarily the work of a fresh Republican congress.
Furthermore, note that the surpluses were projected and largely relied on a non-finalized tobacco deal with the promise that the funds would be found elsewhere if it fell through.
Maybe people like Bush wouldn't get elected if the opposition could at least pretend to have a clue.
From now on, I buy only Intel.
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?"
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
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)?
Pointy Hair Roach: "So, let's see, I wonder if the technical department can create a turn-key solution for feeding tonight?"
Long Hair Roach: "Sure, what do you have in mind?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "Well, let's see, we need a diversion, why don't we have a volunteer climb up into the light fixture and drop onto her sholder, which will cause her to scream, flail about, and run out of the room."
Long Hair Roach: "Um, how do we get into to the light fixture?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "I dunno, go license some tech from the ants for hanging from ceilings and stuff."
Long Hair Roach: "Uh... ok."
Pointy Hair Roach: "Right, so while the volunteer is running back and forth avoiding the fly swatter, huge feet, and general mayhem, we'll monitor progress from the counter top."
Long Hair Roach: "So, who's going to volunteer?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "Well, since you brought it up..."
Long Hair Roach: "So, you want me to outsource the tech to the ants, then use it untested to scale a vertical wall, hang from a ceiling, get into a light fixture without being electrocuted - you didn't think of that, did you? And then dropping onto a human and avoiding getting crushed. Wait, what are you going to do to contribute?"
Pointy Hair Roach: "We'll be eating the toast."
Support for the parent statement: U.S. Federal Deficit by Political Party.
--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
All they need is Powerpoint and they can start applying for middle management jobs.
Now that is such beautiful irony... I think I'm going to cry...
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Ah, so that explains why Cylons keep attacking my kitchen cupboards...
Blank until
So do they use email, or IM?
Or do they communicate using discussion forums?
If I recall correctly, that was the episode with Bambi, the hot entomology PhD. She actually looked like one of the lab preceptors that was at University of Illinois, C-U, while I was there. (also when the show aired). I wish I remembered her name or even what her voice sounded like, but damn if the constant track of "oh-my-god-you're-so-hot" wasn't going through my head whenever she'd speak.
Emergence. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence Be enlightened. I was, when I came across the phenomenon the first time.
Ummmm, no, sorry.
That graph you pointed to shows the US national debt, not the deficit. The debt will go up as long as there's a deficit. If last year's deficit was 1000 times bigger than this year's, the debt goes up (because we're still in deficit) but the deficit goes down, get it?
Now, I agree that deficit financing is wrong but that previous graph showing the deficit (not the debt) clearly demonstrates that every Democratic president since Carter managed to DEcrease the spending deficit during his term. Every Republican president over that same interval managed to INcrease the spending deficit.
If you have evidence to the contrary, please post that instead of your lame attempts to obfuscate reality.
How do we know that they're making group decisions rather than hypnotizing each other?
(you may recall a slashdot article about wasps stinging cockroaches to hypnotize them...)
Great, so cockroaches resemble a commitee at the office, making 'group' decisions before they attack that donut you dropped.. And this helps us how?
Hmm, now that you think about it, sounds a lot like where i work..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Ahh nothing like quoting a breakthrough cited by the Discovery Channel, network provider of "Psychic and Paranormal" programming
I must be VERY hungry.
I read the headline " Cockroaches Make Group Decisions?"
As " Cockroaches Make Great Soup "
I can't imagine how bad that soup would taste. I wonder when Slashdot became a recipie site.
Oh You POS
This isn't rocket science. We all know that Irak invasion, err liberation, was a group descision involving bush, cheney, as well as halliburton and lockheed martin board of directors.
perception is reality
"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 females using the bathroom.
Users... the only thing keeping 1st level support from being the bottom feeders.
Here is a link to the original paper on which the article is based:
m e=&firstpage=&DOI=&author1=halloy&author2=&title=& andorexacttitle=and&titleabstract=&andorexacttitle abs=and&fulltext=&andorexactfulltext=and&fmonth=Ma r&fyear=2006&tmonth=Apr&tyear=2006&fdatedef=1+Janu ary+1915&tdatedef=4+April+2006&tocsectionid=all&RE SULTFORMAT=1&hits=10&hitsbrief=25&sortspec=relevan ce&sortspecbrief=relevance&sendit=Search
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/search?pubdate_year=&volu
Does anyone with a subscription to the National Academy of Sciences care to
post the complete text?
And not to mention... that graph does indeed show that the actual debt, when corrected for inflation, declined during the clinton years... which means a net surplus for that time. Now, I'm not giving full credit to Clinton on this, a lot of it being a strong economy at the time (and therefore higher taxes) due in large to the dot.com era tech bubble. But then again, the econmy was pretty strong in the 80's under Reagan, and look what the debt did during that time.
Really makes sense considering that FULLY HALF of the current budget is in military related expenses. I mean... of course the united states has to spend more on its military than the rest of the world... combined.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
As for me, I'm just sad we have to wait until September for the new season of Blattellastar Germanica.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
So does this mean that I can now have my cockroach army to do my own bidding? Watch your balls bush.
Here comes the obligatory joke!
In Soviet Russia, cockroaches put YOU in 3 shelters!
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())