In the Arizona desert where Deborah Gordon studies red harvesterants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus), a colony calculates each morning how many workers to send out foraging for food.
Deborah Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University who has spent decades studying harvesterants in the Arizona desert, summed up the concept this way: "Ants aren't smart. Ant colonies are."
斯坦福大学的生物学家 Deborah Gordon 研究亚利桑那沙漠的收获蚂蚁已有几十年的时间，他对这个概念有如下的概括：蚂蚁很笨，但蚁群很聪明。