Scientists Compared Humans and Ants Maneuvering a T-Shaped Object Through a Maze. The Results Were Surprising

Unlike the egg-headed, opposing-thumbed humans, ants don’t enjoy solitude. Ants are highly social animals who cannot survive without their community. When an ant gets lonely, it loses its vigor. Its body becomes incapable of digesting food, and within a matter of a few days, it dies. When an ant crawls out of her nest and senses food chemicals with her chemosensors, she instantly signals other ants using her antennae and leaves a trail for them to follow. So while humans are generally considered more intelligent and better problem-solvers, a new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has shown that a colony of ants is more skilled in managing interpersonal relationships than a group of humans.

A human’s brain contains over 86 billion neurons and an ant's brain just about 250,000. At first, these figures might indicate that humans are more intelligent than ants. Indeed, humans can comprehend complex thoughts, which ants lack. But when Professor Ofer Feinerman and his team from the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) studied both humans and ants solving a complex load-transporting puzzle, he was nothing less than astonished.

To conduct the study, a research team led by Tabea Dreyer created a real-life version of the “piano movers puzzle,” a classical computational problem that involves possible ways of moving an unusually shaped object, such as a piano, from point A to point B in a complex environment. Instead of a piano, the participants of the study, both humans and ants, were required to move an awkward T-shaped object through narrow maze-like passages designed like a rectangle and divided into three chambers connected by two narrow slits.

The experiment was scaled to fit the different body sizes of humans and ants. While humans participated willingly, ants were lured into the experiment with morsels of sweet treats. The species of ants chosen for the study was Paratrechina longicornis which have extremely long antennae and are sometimes referred to as “crazy ants.” The ants managed to solve the puzzle by forming three group combinations: a single ant, a small group of about seven ants, and a large group of about 80. Humans, on the other hand, tackled the maze in three parallel combinations: a single person, a small group of six to nine individuals, and a large group of 26. Communication between humans was restricted with the help of masks and sunglasses.

When dealing with the problem alone, humans naturally had the upper hand over ants. But when clubbed in groups, the performance of humans significantly declined while the ants outperformed. Demonstrating an excellent example of group decision-making, teamwork, and collective intelligence, ants were better able to tackle the puzzle whereas humans tended to gravitate towards “greedy solutions” and “lowest common denominator.”

Analyzing the results, Feinerman described that “ants acting as a group” are smarter and for them, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In contrast, forming groups did not seem to expand the cognitive abilities of humans, unlike what modern-day social networks depict. “An ant colony is actually a family,” explained Feinerman. “All the ants in the nest are sisters, and they have common interests. It’s a tightly knit society in which cooperation greatly outweighs competition. That’s why an ant colony is sometimes referred to as a super-organism, sort of a living body composed of multiple ‘cells’ that cooperate with one another.”

With sophisticated intelligence and verbal communication ability, humans may perform way better than ants when participating at an individual level. But at the collective level, ants are one step ahead. This study is an interesting addition to the growing body of evidence that proves that when it comes to teamwork and interpersonal relationships, ants are way more skilled than humans.