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.

Kafkaesque

Not only can they communicate, but they also have a staunch work ethic [wikipedia.org]. They've been known to make every attempt to get to work on time regardless of whatever transformations may happen to them over night.

Poor Gregor, no matter how hard he released pheromones, his parents just wouldn't listen ... er ... smell to him.

Re:Kafkaesque

Cockroaches are able to make group decisions without a leader. With a staunch work ethic, they would be a perfect candidate for communism. The huge population of Ants have been communist for quite some time. We can't let this spread into a domino effect! We must destory all cockroaches before communism spreads to all the other insects!

Re:Kafkaesque

"he Discovery Channel is reporting a recent study indicates that cockroaches govern themselves using simple group consultations before anything that affects the entire group."

Sounds like the management at about every company I've ever worked for....

cockroach, manager

potatO, potAto....

Re:Kafkaesque

They have a monarchist government, but a communist economy...or something. Either way we should destroy ants too. Preferably with magnifying glasses.

That explains it!

That explains all those committees and cabinets then that politicians constantly set up. Only cockroaches are obviously much more effective in their efforts.

X-Files

Cockroaches are interesting enough to have been the focus of one X-Files episode, War of the Coprophages [wikipedia.org]

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.

Re:X-Files

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.

Ahh man, I loved that

Re:You forgot the best part of that episode...

Dr. B. Berenbaum [imdb.com]

Nature's middle-management.

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."

Re:Nature's middle-management.

good one :) ... board meeting... lol... im still laughing, man must i be tired!

Re:Nature's middle-management.

"Cockroaches have regular staff meetings in order to create synergy, redefine their core competencies, implement new strategems, and satisfy shareholders."

In my experience those aren't sure signifiers of intelligence at work.

Cockroach Staff Meeting Intercept

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."

Roach Intelligence

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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.

Re:Roach Intelligence

Wouldn't this just be a simple case of emergent behavior? Like, the roach has a simple rule that they follow over and over again, and when the house gets too big that rule proells them to the next house. Like somethign along the lines of:

1) Stay in shelter
2) Count other roaches nearby
3) If otherCount > X move to the next house.

I have heard ants follow this kind of "reasoning" and thus perform very complext tasks.

1) Gather Food
2) If gatherFoodSmell becomes too strong then hunt for food
3) If fellowHunters smell becomes too strong then make tunnel repairs

etc...

Re:Roach Intelligence

2) Count other roaches nearby

Therein lies the problem -- roaches can't "count" in any normal sense of the word. The fact that (according to TFA) roaches split themselves into two populations of 25 is amazing.

Of course the article was rather lacking in details. Was it always 25, or was it sometimes a 27/23 split?

Roach Intelligence - and math skills

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.

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.

Intelligence

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.

Re:Intelligence

I know a few people who communicate with chemical emissions. It isn't a sign of intelligence.

Smarter then many humans?

cockroach decision-making follows a predictable pattern

So some of my past managers really were dumber than cockroaches? I knew it! Thank you /. for validating what I knew all along.

So that's why he went down.

Poor Scarface. He didn't realize those cockroaches he was going to bury were colluding together against him.

Words of wisdom, I guess.

That explains...

Why I feel like a cockroach after a meeting. :P

Uh.

No Politics topic?

Is this still a matter of debate?

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

Re:Is this still a matter of debate?

"smells" are hard to detect

Not that hard.

Group Intelligence...

Is that why I keep finding my Raid cans with the nozzle broken off? Damn bugs!

More pictures

As the article is scarce on pics, here [google.com] some more pictures of the cockroaches meeting up before making decisions. :)

Atoms are democratic too

Researchers in Kentucky performed the following experiment: they placed a carboard divide with a small hole in it across the middle of a shoe box so as to split it into to halves of equal size. Amazingly it was found that the same amount of air ended up in both halves. "I reckon this proves that atoms have notions of fairness, democracy and property," said the leading researcher of the group, "they were able to divide themselves up equally between the partitions.". They found that similar results were obtained with a variety of different partitioning scheme - whatever scheme was chosen the atoms always divided themselves up fairly so that each atom had the same amount of space.

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.

bogus experiment :-D

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.

Re:Atoms are democratic too

Anthropomorphizations do not like to be mocked.

Re:Atoms are democratic too

Exaclty. It is hardly news that social insects communicate with each other and that they do so by interacting with each other. And just because all participate in the decision doesn't mean that it is democratic. I suspect that the actual scientific pape

Wow, that's cool, but...

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.

Yes, you're right

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.

Re:Yes, you're right

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.

ngm wasn't the one that accused you of jumping the gun, that was ergo98. Maybe you shouldn't

A lttle more information would be nice

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 other

Cockroach Decisions

Will cockroaches out-survive humans?

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!

Cockroaches Make Group Decisions?

Well, how else are politicians going to get their laws passed?

So, for people....

Instead of using EGroupware [egroupware.org] or PHPGroupware [phpgroupware.org], we should just start using using silent communications like cockroaches...

"...So does that mean I'm #1, or ....HEY!"

A cleaned-up copy of the story

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.

In another study....

Researchers find that unlike roaches, human make a single group decision on who will make all the group decisions every 4 years.

History will tell ....

that the last girl who ever visited slashdot was on 4th April who read Roaches who make group decisions

Religious Cult

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?

huh

correct me if i am wrong, but isnt a cokroach Periplaneta americana?

I'd be nice to see the real results...

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?"

Emergent behavior

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)?

Re:nothing to hear here, move along

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.

Re:nothing to hear here, move along

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

U.S. Federal Deficit by Political Party

Support for the parent statement: U.S. Federal Deficit by Political Party [futurepower.org].

--
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?

Re:nothing to hear here, move along

Correct. And don't forget that the metaphor for a Democrat-controlled Congress is pigs at a trough. They do vocalize.

Re:Of course they communicate...

So you are saying our Nuclear program...is bugged?

Re:Biological spelling flame...

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?