A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and a
computer scientist has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants as they
forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet.
On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have
much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of
harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the
same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for
the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the "anternet."