Scientists simulate ant swarms, find a single ant can set the colony in motion

Some ant species mobilize in synchronized waves that start with a "first mover" ant.

New Jersey Institute of Technology

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The arboreal ant Temnothorax affinis. Some ant species in this genus swarm in synchronized waves that start with a "first mover" ant.

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Credit: Photo by Gilles San Martin, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20140427_163127_7375M.JPG

In ant colonies, a single ant can be the catalyst for a wave of mob activity, launching brief bursts of coordinated movement involving hundreds or even thousands of swarming workers, according to new simulations from New Jersey Institute of Technology. 

About three decades ago, biologists discovered that acorn ants in the species Leptothorax acervorum, Temnothorax allardycei, T. rugatulus, and T. rudis would periodically move together as one. Masses of insects in the colony suddenly surged into action and then subsided, seemingly at random intervals. Collective spikes of activity aren't exclusive to ants or other animals; schooling fish, fireflies' signals, chemical reactions and firing neurons do this, too. But not all complex systems, or even all types of ants, produce short bursts of synchronized motion. 

To better understand what launches and shapes patterns of collective movement and rest, researchers built a mathematical model inspired by waves of ant activity. Their findings, published August 5 in the journal PRX Life, show how just one ant in a colony — a "first mover" — activates a group. Moving from ant to ant, motion then ripples through the colony, activating a significant portion of the colony before the wave eventually runs its course. 

"In many collective systems, such cascades typically appear only if enough individuals are already active themselves — a quorum of sorts," said study co-author Simon Garnier, an NJIT professor of biological sciences. "The most surprising result is that a single ant is able to trigger an entire cascade of activity." This work is part of an NSF grant for which Garnier is the lead principal investigator, exploring activity management and energy use in group systems made of autonomous individuals.

Garnier and two co-authors at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering — doctoral student Michael Napoli and Maurizio Porfiri, a professor and director of the Center for Urban Science + Progress — created a model that represented each ant as it moved independently through a virtual nest. Every ant could switch between three states: active, inactive, or temporarily unresponsive. 

"These switches could occur spontaneously or be triggered by encounters with active nestmates," Garnier said. 

The researchers then varied movements and interactions between ants, to see when individual activity would not affect other ants, and when it would launch coordinated movement within the colony. Using data from prior research of actual ant colonies, the scientists weighed variables such as the density of ants, ant movement speed and sensing distance between nestmates. 

According to the simulation, when ant density, speed and distance were just right, one ant's movement was all that was needed to nudge a large portion of the group into motion.

Synchronized activity bursts among ants reflect a delicate equilibrium, balancing the transmission of a single ant's actions with the colony's ability to "deactivate" the cascade, the researchers found. Allowing that deactivation creates a rest period before the next wave of movement, which is a key part of these activity patterns. As social insects, ants rely greatly on high-speed communication between individuals; cycles of movement bursts not only demonstrate how information spreads between nestmates rapidly, but also show the importance of quiet time between calls to action.

Swift mass mobilization may help colonies respond quickly to environmental changes or threats; however, there are potential drawbacks to a colony-wide response. If the ant that triggered the cascade misread the environmental cues at the start, the group could spend a lot of energy for nothing. 

"Fortunately, we showed in earlier studies that ants have a regulation mechanism against that," Garnier explains. "Once too many individuals are active, they tend to inhibit each other and the colony goes back quickly towards a more quiescent state. The end result is that the colony is very reactive without being wasteful." 

The findings could help explain complex dynamics within ant colonies, and may have implications outside the insect world. Engineers could apply lessons from rhythmic ant swarms to autonomous artificial agents that also need to react as a group to cyclical changes in their environment. One such example is fleets of autonomous taxis responding to spikes in customer requests for rides, Garnier says. Looking to ants for inspiration could improve communication, interaction and coordination in autonomous taxis, speeding up their response time "without wasting energy by mobilizing too many agents at once."

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Journal

PRX Life

DOI

10.1103/ghnl-p5c1 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Nest-Level Phase Transition Drives Synchronized Activity Bursts in Ant Colonies

Article Publication Date

5-Aug-2026

(a) The sensing area and an example interaction between two ants. (b) Over a bout of movement, an individual is capable of interacting with other ants in the domain spanned by its duration-specific area coverage (red). The edge of the area coverage (blue), was not included as part of the sensing region.

Credit

Napoli, M., Garnier, S., & Porfiri, M. (2026). Nest-Level Phase Transition Drives Synchronized Activity Bursts in Ant Colonies. PRX Life, 4(3). https://doi.org/10.1103/ghnl-p5c1

 

Random physics helps model individual ant motion

Researchers develop a model that reproduces and predicts individual ant movement, opening new avenues for understanding ant behavior in urban environments.

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) Graduate University

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A long-legged ant climbing over a plant on a concrete structure in Okinawa, Japan.

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Credit: Jack Featherstone

Ants make up one of the most diverse groups of animals on the planet, with many species boasting unrivaled physical and social behavior, and an overall species richness that far exceeds that of mammals. Various types of ants can carry up to one hundred times their weight or forage hundreds of meters from their nest, the equivalent of a human carrying thousands of kilograms and walking hundreds of kilometers. These feats have inspired researchers to study not only their anatomy that makes this possible, but how they make use of these capabilities to forage and explore. By recording how individual ants move around a laboratory environment, researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have come up with a physics-based model for how these ants navigate, now published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. 

Animal motion has been a topic of fascination for scientists for a long time, though physicists have only really gotten involved in the past few decades. OIST PhD student Jack Featherstone, part of the Nonlinear and Non-equilibrium Physics Unit, explains: “Life is one of the most interesting mysteries out there, rivaling the universal extremes of quantum mechanics or astrophysics in complexity. Physicists have now begun applying many of the quantitative tools developed to study the non-living world to explore why animals move and behave the way they do.” 

Trekking out to the wilds — or rather, the parking lot — to gather specimens 

The foundation of most animal behavior studies begins with observing living specimens and gathering quantitative data about how they behave. The OIST researchers were interested to study one type of ant, known as the long-legged or yellow crazy ant (A. gracilipes), due to its reputation as a particularly aggressive invasive species. As a result, these ants are increasingly colonizing urban habitats as they spread across the globe, making it all the more important to understand how they navigate and explore in artificial environments. 

In a clear sign of their widespread presence in Okinawa, the researchers had little difficulty finding specimens. After gathering more than 100 ants from locations like parking lots, walkways, and sitting areas around campus, Featherstone and colleagues placed them alone in arenas in the laboratory to record how they explore the new environment. The researchers emphasize that understanding how these ants move when they are alone is very important, though sometimes overlooked.  

“Ants are very famous for their collective interactions, mediated by pheromones or other sophisticated communication systems, but the individual motion of an ant is the building block that makes this collective behavior possible,” says Featherstone.  

Following the experiments, the researchers trained a neural network to analyze video recordings of the ants. The network tracked the position of different parts of each ant’s body as it explored, generating spatial trajectories that the researchers could then quantitatively analyze. 

How random physics can help us understand animal behavior 

The researchers found that the key ingredient to better understand and model the ant behavioral data lay in stochastic, or random, modelling. Famously important to understanding diffusion and the motion of small particles, this approach assumes that the overall, non-random behavior of a system can be constructed from individual, random contributions. 

“The behavior of any animal depends on a massive number of variables, from the states of individual neurons in their brains, to the weather around them, to what they had for breakfast.  Trying to measure every factor that might be relevant here is impossible; instead, the stochastic approach allows us to explore macroscopic behavior without getting lost in the microscopic details,” says Featherstone. 

Their proposed model, which includes a combination of several techniques often used in studying bacterial motion or diffusion processes, can reproduce many of the features of the experimental trajectory data. It also allows them to computationally or mathematically derive predictions about how the ants might behave in new environments, which they hope to use to study how these ants interact with other species, either as predators or as prey. 

As one of the most rigorous descriptions of ant exploration behavior — including the ability to simulate ant-like motion — this study may help other researchers understand how locomotion fits into the rest of an ant’s life; external stimuli, in the form of food, water, predators, or obstacles will have the ants adjust their behavior from the baseline that this work provides. In the future, it could even be used to better understand and contain invasive ants. And even beyond ants, this modeling approach could be easily adapted to explore how navigation, foraging, and exploration vary throughout the rest of the animal kingdom. 

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Journal

PLOS Computational Biology

DOI

10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014069 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Stochastic modeling of long-legged ant A. gracilipes locomotion in laboratory experiments

Article Publication Date

6-Aug-2026

Laboratory tracking experiments [VIDEO] 

Researchers place individual long-legged ants in a laboratory arena and record their exploration behavior and movement patterns using a camera.

Neural network tracking approach [VIDEO] 

Researchers use a neural network to track the position of individual ants as they explore an experimental arena.

Credit

Jack Featherstone

Ready, set, march: Researchers use math to explain sudden activity bursts in ants

NYU Tandon School of Engineering

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Scientists have long known that ant colonies sometimes seem to move as one. A nest that appears quiet can suddenly erupt into activity, with workers throughout the colony springing into motion almost simultaneously before settling back into stillness.

These synchronized bursts, first documented more than three decades ago, have intrigued biologists because they resemble collective phenomena seen in systems as diverse as neurons, fireflies and even chemical reactions.

Now, new research from engineers and biologists at New York University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology offers a mathematical explanation for how these rhythmic waves of activity emerge.

The study, published in Physical Review X Life, suggests that synchronized bursts arise when a colony balances two competing forces: the ability of a single active ant to rapidly excite its nestmates and the colony’s capacity to fully return to rest before the next wave begins.

Using a computational model grounded in empirical observations of ant behavior, the researchers found that colonies undergo a kind of phase transition — a sudden shift from unsynchronized movement to coordinated collective activity.

“Activity bursts emerge as a balance between the responsiveness of the colony to the first ant that activates and the ability of the colony to completely deactivate before the onset of the next burst,” said lead author Michael Napoli, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NYU.

The team combined decades of observations of ant movement with established theories of social activation. In the model, ants can occupy one of three states: active, inactive or refractory — a temporary resting period during which they cannot immediately become active again. Active ants move through a virtual nest and interact with others, sometimes triggering them to become active as well.

What emerged from the simulations was a surprisingly powerful role for individual workers. Rather than requiring many ants to coordinate simultaneously, a single ant often acted as the spark that ignited a colony-wide cascade of activity.

The researchers call this worker the “first mover.” Once activated, that ant can stimulate others, which in turn activate additional nestmates, creating a rapid chain reaction that sweeps through the colony. The process resembles a line of falling dominoes or the spread of information through a social network.

“Our results indicate that activity bursts in ant colonies are the result of a first mover that excites the colony in a synchronized regime, thereby favoring the rapid communication of new behaviors throughout the group,” the authors write.

The study also revealed that speed matters. Ants appear to operate in what the researchers describe as a “high-speed interaction regime,” where information spreads through the nest far more quickly than the duration of an activity burst itself. Under these conditions, workers constantly form and break social connections as they move, allowing information to travel efficiently across the colony.

According to senior author Maurizio Porfiri, the findings suggest that synchronized behavior depends not simply on how many interactions occur, but on how rapidly information can propagate through the network of moving individuals.

“The timescale of the motion of individuals through the nest is faster than that of the burst, suggesting that ants operate in a high-speed interaction regime where new behaviors are near-instantaneously transferred through the nest,” Porfiri said.

Although the study focuses on ants, its implications extend beyond insect societies. Simon Garnier, Professor of Biological Sciences at NJIT and coauthor on the paper, suggests similar leader-driven cascades appear in many complex systems, from grazing sheep that suddenly cluster together to neurons firing in coordinated patterns. By identifying the conditions that promote synchronization, the researchers hope to uncover general principles that govern collective behavior across biology.

The work could even inspire new approaches to engineering. Swarms of robots, for example, often rely on local interactions rather than centralized control. Understanding how a single agent can trigger coordinated action across a large population could help designers create more efficient systems for tasks such as warehouse logistics, environmental monitoring or disaster response.

The authors caution that their model simplifies many aspects of real ant colonies, including differences among workers and the complex spatial organization of nests. Future experiments will test whether real colonies operate near the synchronization threshold predicted by the model and whether manipulating density or movement patterns can alter the emergence of activity bursts.

For now, the research offers a compelling explanation for one of social insects’ most mysterious behaviors. What appears to be a colony acting with a single mind may actually begin with one ant taking the first step — and thousands of others rapidly following its lead.

This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

---

Journal

PRX Life

DOI

10.1103/ghnl-p5c1 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Nest-Level Phase Transition Drives Synchronized Activity Bursts in Ant Colonies

Article Publication Date

5-Aug-2026

Tiny light, big dream: Harvesting power from soil in Japan

AFP
August 5, 2026 

Battery cells inside the “Ku-An” test lab in Hitachi-ota, Ibaraki Prefecture – Copyright AFP Philip FONG

Glinting in the night, halfway up a hill in Japan, the greenhouse-like “Ku-An” test lab is lit by electricity harnessed from 1,500 wooden boxes of soil and compost.

Designer Satoshi Nakagawa has long battled sceptics, but believes that the technology powering the 800 LEDs has a role to play in solving humanity’s energy conundrum.

And, failing that, it at least looks nice — and gets people thinking.

“As the population moves toward 10 billion, energy issues will become just as critical as food issues,” said Nakagawa, chief executive of design firm Tripod Design.

“Even if it’s just a small contribution, I want people to be able to produce their own electricity using the soil around them,” the Japanese product designer and engineer told AFP.

The 72-year-old said he has pioneered “micropower collection (MPC)” — a way to source tiny dribbles of electrical current from everything from wine to French bread.

His system uses the same mechanism as the voltaic pile, the world’s first electrical battery giving a continuous current invented in 1799 by Alessandro Volta.

It involves inserting electrodes made of materials such as zinc and copper into substances that contain moisture or ions, and then collecting the small but steady electrical currents.

Within eyeshot of the glass-covered “Ku-An”, which he has rigged up in the remote town of Hitachi-ota, is “Lu-An”, which opened last year.

“Lu-An” has some 2,000 plastic cylinders of soil and compost to give 100 watts of output, enough to power a rice cooker and other appliances.

Nakagawa said the technology could be applied, for example, in places without power, including after natural disasters.

It could also provide enough electricity for off-grid devices requiring little power, such as sensors to detect pest damage to farmland, overflowing rivers, landslides or even burglar alarms.

Once installed, the technology produces no carbon dioxide, and unlike other renewables such as solar or wind power is not weather-dependent, Nakagawa said.



– ‘Move our emotions’ –



Prototype products include a “stand-alone node” — a bollard-like object powered by soil which enables data communication with a satellite.

He has also used the technology for art installations with flexible rods that, when speared into the ground, have tips that glow in the dark like fireflies on tall grass.

Professional engineers have said Nakagawa’s products can be aesthetically pleasing and thought-provoking, but that his system is not practical.

“Its output is significantly inferior compared with regular batteries or car batteries,” said Masayuki Nakao, engineering professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, who has known Nakagawa for years.

“But what is notable about Mr Nakagawa’s works is that the light that he creates has the power to move our emotions. People are moved by it when they see the light. They are beautiful,” said Nakao.

Nakagawa has shrugged off his sceptics and said engineers must build new products that benefit from MPC.

“I say it’s micro power, so we have to think about what micro power can do,” he said.

“We should look at the combination of various energy-harvesting technologies as crucial to our overall energy strategy,” he said.

“Possibility is without limit.”

 

When does the body clock begin to synchronize with local time?

Daily rhythms cross placenta from mother to the baby before the fetus can sense light

Washington University in St. Louis

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By Talia Ogliore

Humans and most other organisms have internal biological clocks that track the daily cycle of sunrise and sunset. These clocks help time our sleep, metabolism and other essential body functions over the course of a day, creating daily patterns called circadian rhythms. Research shows that when these rhythms are disrupted — by jet lag, lack of sleep or irregular work schedules — people can suffer long-term negative health effects.

Scientists who study daily rhythms have long wondered about when the mammalian circadian clock starts ticking and synchronizes to local time. In a new study published in the Journal of Biological Rhythms, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis reported that a mother helps to set the biological clock for her babies while they are still in the womb.

“We know that disrupting circadian rhythms during pregnancy can affect how sleep and daily rhythms develop in infants, and these early disruptions are linked to a higher risk of mood disorders such as anxiety and depression later in life,” said Nikhil Lokesh, study author and a research scientist in biology in WashU Arts & Sciences. “Understanding when the fetal clock begins to function helps us identify sensitive developmental windows when circadian disruption may have lasting effects and how those effects might be prevented or corrected.”

For this new study, WashU scientists developed a way to observe circadian clock activity in fetuses while they are still developing inside the womb. The scientists used genetically engineered mice in which a luminescent protein called luciferase, the same protein that makes fireflies glow, is attached to a clock protein that drives circadian rhythms.

When a male mouse carrying this modified protein mates with a normal female, the tagged clock protein appears in the developing fetuses but not in the mother’s tissues. The pregnant mice were then given drinking water laced with a chemical that reacts with luciferase to produce light. Whenever the clock protein was active in the fetuses, they glowed.

The researchers detected that fetal light using highly sensitive cameras. By recording the glow’s timing, they were able to identify clear cyclical patterns of clock protein expression in babies while they developed inside their mothers’ womb.

“We found clear day-night rhythms in the pups that synchronized to the mother’s rest-activity cycle during the last week of pregnancy, equivalent to the third trimester in humans,” Lokesh said. “This suggests that the clock machinery forms early in development and receives entraining cues from mom later.”

“Importantly, we found daily rhythms across the placenta from the mother to the baby before the fetus can sense light,” said Erik Herzog, the Viktor Hamburger Distinguished Professor in biology, senior author on the study.

The researchers found that circadian synchronization of the pups to the mother coincided with when glucocorticoid hormones from the mother cross the placenta, potentially acting as timing signals for the fetal clock. These stress-related hormones normally rise and fall over the course of the day under the control of the mother’s internal clock.

Synthetic glucocorticoids are routinely given to pregnant women at risk of preterm birth, often without considering the time of day when these hormones naturally fluctuate. The authors found that giving these steroids daily to the mother accelerated the synchronization to local time of the daily rhythms in the pups. These findings may be important when considering how and when doctors administer medications to treat pregnancy conditions.

During the study, the researchers also observed a strong association between failure to develop circadian clock gene activity in the fetuses and failure to deliver. “We cannot yet say whether the absence of rhythms contributes to developmental problems or simply reflects them,” Lokesh said. “But the observation suggests that circadian clock activity may be closely linked to healthy fetal development.”

Lokesh said the findings also highlight the importance of maintaining stable circadian rhythms during pregnancy. “Over 80 percent of the world’s population is exposed to artificial light at night that can disrupt daily rhythms, and this includes pregnant people,” he said.

“Understanding when and how the body clock starts ticking helps scientists identify sensitive developmental windows when circadian disruption may have lasting effects,” Lokesh said. “This knowledge could help guide medical treatments, inform clinical practices and shape public health policies aimed at protecting neonatal circadian health during pregnancy.”

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Nikhil KL, Bates K, Sapiro E, Amme JL, McCarthy R, Speck SL, Vasireddy V, Roberts E, Martin-Fairey CA, Domínguez-Romero ME, Cárdenas-García SP, England SK and Herzog ED. Fetoplacental circadian rhythms develop and then synchronize to the mother in utero. Journal of Biological Rhythms. April 10, 2026. DOI: 10.1177/07487304261435435

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants NINDS R01NS12116 and the March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center. KLN was supported by a fellowship from the McDonnell Center for Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology.

In a South Carolina swamp, researchers uncover secrets of firefly synchrony

University of Colorado at Boulder

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Fireflies twinkle against a backdrop of stars in Congaree National Park.

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Credit: Nolan Bonnie

In the middle of the old-growth forests of Congaree National Park in South Carolina, fireflies put on an other-worldly display every May. Thousands of male insects belonging to the species Photuris frontalis flash together at the same time and follow the exact same pattern—a synchronous light show you can see only in few places in the United States.

Scientists and nature lovers have long been fascinated by how such simple insects can work together in perfect harmony. 

In a new study, engineers from the University of Colorado Boulder have uncovered the mathematical rules fireflies follow to sync up their flashes.

The team’s findings could one day lead to new designs for robots that move in swarms and could help scientists better understand other examples of synchrony in biology—such as neurons firing at the same time in the brain, or cells syncing to the body’s internal clock, also known as circadian rhythm. 

“It’s magical,” said Orit Peleg, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at CU Boulder. “At certain times of night, fireflies have a single rhythm for the entire group, and they’re very punctual.”

Peleg will present the team’s results Monday, March 16 at the American Physical Society’s 2026 Global Physics Summit in Denver. The researchers published their findings online ahead of peer review.

In the study, the researchers exposed individual male fireflies to a dim LED light—almost like an artificial version of a firefly.

If that light blinked faster than the males, the insects tended to speed up their flashing. If the light blinked slowly, the insects slowed down.

Think of it like an audience member in a crowded concert hall who is trying to join others clapping along to the beat.

“This research opens the door to discovering other examples of synchronization in nature that we haven’t seen yet,” said Owen Martin, the lead author of the research who earned his doctorate in computer science from CU Boulder in 2025.  

Old patterns

The graduate student spent several summers at Congaree over the course of the experiment. 

It’s a swampy area where cypress and tupelo trees hundreds of years old tower over the landscape. Martin remembers spending nights watching the twinkling light from fireflies reflect on the water of the park’s Cedar Creek.

“It makes me think of what that part of the Earth was like before people were there,” he said. “There is this strong sensation that everything is old.”

To study those ancient rhythms, Martin and Peleg set up a unique experiment: The team gently captured male fireflies one-by-one, then brought them into a tent that was completely shaded from all outside light.

Martin then sat in the pitch black and shined the LED at the males.

He explained that, under natural circumstances, fireflies tend to flash about once or twice every second. The group set its own LED to blink anywhere between once every second to once every 300 milliseconds. 

The fireflies kept the beat.

In particular, the insects were most likely to change their own rhythm when the LED blinked almost at the same time as the fireflies, but just a hair off. If the LED blinked right before the firefly, the male often rushed its next flash to catch up to the light. If the LED blinked right after, the firefly waited a little longer to make its next flash.

If the LED was way off from the fireflies’ natural behavior, in contrast, they usually ignored it.

“For a whole season, I spent pretty much every night in the dark watching lights blink at a fixed frequency,” Martin said. “Then, occasionally, I’d get this magical experience where I’d see the firefly just start syncing with the light. I would wonder if I was just seeing things.” 

Swarming robots

He wasn’t. Drawing on their observations, Martin and Peleg developed what mathematicians call a “phase-response curve” for the firefly flashes—essentially, a formula that describes how an outside light source drives fireflies to change their own flashing patterns.

The researchers noted that the team still has a lot of work to do to understand Congaree’s magical fireflies. 

For a start, males in the wild rarely just see a single other source of light as they did in the team’s experiments. Instead, they’re usually in groups of dozens or more fireflies, all blinking at the same time. 

Engineers can also learn a lot from what fireflies do in the wild. Study co-author Kaushik Jayaram, an engineer at Imperial College London, noted that future drones could communicate using visual signals, similar to fireflies.

“Peer-peer optical communication can be lower power and more secure, resulting more efficient swarming and robust aggregations despite requiring line-of-sight, adding a complementary capability to today’s miniature SWAP-constrained drones which largely rely on radio frequency-based approaches,” Jayaram said. 

Peleg added that she envisions a future in which fleets of tiny robots work together to complete tasks without any central command.

“If you’re trying to get a lot of robots to push a large object, and they’re pushing at different times, then they’re going to struggle,” she said. “But if they’re all pushing at the same time, they’ll be a lot more successful.”

Long-exposure photo of a firefly swarm in Congaree.

Credit

Nolan Bonnie