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I’m interested in how simple individual actions, like a bird changing direction in flight, or a wildebeest moving across a plain, scale up to very complex group behaviour like flocking, or stampedes. Starling flocks are a good example of a huge group of animals that almost looks as though it’s behaving as a single animal. (A flock like this is known as a ‘murmuration’ of starlings – one of my favourite words!)

(Watch the very cool video of these birds here)
Studying one individual animal is very different from studying hundreds or thousands of animals together. (And humans are no exception – a huge crowd at a football stadium behaves very differently from people by themselves.)

I use colonies of ants to study these ideas. All the ants in a colony work on jobs such as cleaning the nest, looking after the queen ant or leaving the nest to find food. However, there is no single ant telling the rest what to do. Each ant goes about its work without being instructed or knowing what other ants are doing. So how does a colony of ants organize itself, if nobody’s in charge?

I study the behaviour of individual ants, and the behaviour of the whole colony together to look at how this organization works.

At the moment, a typical morning involves gluing about one hundred tiny bar codes onto the backs of about one hundred ants. Everything has to be done under a microscope using miniature tools made from matchsticks and wire. By the end of tagging, the colony looks like this:

(The cream-coloured blobs without any bar codes are the eggs. The ants spend most of their time looking after the eggs and the queen.)
In the afternoon I film the ants working in the nest and finding food outside the nest. I use a computer program to track the ants as they move around, using these bar codes. (Without the computer program to do this, I would have to follow every ant individually by eye, which would take a very long time indeed. With the computer program, I can track one hundred ants running around for eight hours in only a few minutes.)

Then I use maths to describe and explain the patterns of behaviour inside the nest. In particular, I want to know how ants communicate with each other inside the nest, and what they’re saying. These particular ants talk to each other by touching antennae, as you can see in the photo just to the right.