Cockroaches Make Group Decisions? 212
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.
Atoms are democratic too (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Wow, that's cool, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Roach Intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the article was rather lacking in details. Was it always 25, or was it sometimes a 27/23 split?
Re:Kafkaesque (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd be nice to see the real results... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, you're right (Score:3, Insightful)
Emergent behavior (Score:3, Insightful)
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)?
Re:Yes, you're right (Score:3, Insightful)
ngm wasn't the one that accused you of jumping the gun, that was ergo98. Maybe you shouldn't have jumped the gun in this reply.
You're really missing what is interesting about this, and both your analogies suck as a result. Neither fluid dynamics nor a simple selfish optimization algorithm describe this behavior. When presented with three shelters each with room for all, all the roaches inhabited one shelter, indicating a preference for large groups. When presented with three shelters with insufficient space, they split into two exactly equal sized groups and occupied two shelters. For this to happen, a potential 26th cockroach who would have fit easily into the 40-roach shelters and thus be part of a larger group decided instead to move into the smaller 24-roach group.
So this behavior is fairly sophisticated, and does in fact involve decisions about the population as a whole and would require communication, which is briefly described as "consultation" preceding the roaches splitting into two groups.