Animals
How Ant Colonies Work: Superorganisms, Pheromones, and Swarm Intelligence
A single ant is close to useless. It has a brain with roughly 250,000 neurons — less than a fruit fly — and no capacity to plan, strategize, or solve multi-step problems alone. Put 500,000 of them together in a colony, and the collective builds climate-controlled fungal farms, wages organized warfare, manages waste disposal, and solves the traveling salesman problem with road networks that engineers have benchmarked against modern infrastructure. The colony is the organism.
