#cooperativebehavior

[turnerpbia]

Week 6 Lesson Review : Self Organization and Cooperative Behavior

It is amazing how much organisms work together to survive and thrive. We as humans, can learn the wisdom of crowds and collective intelligence from honeybees. When trying to solve a problem, it helps to work in groups. What surprised me the most is the flocking of birds. They do not have a leader like I learned from the discussion.

Questions: July 27, 2014

Birds really do not have a leader? How do they communicate where to go? How do they know the group is heading in the right direction?

Honeybees are awesome, is there an activity to show students the amazing group work they possess?

Source:

Alleyne, M. (2014). Biological Materials. IB535 Biology and Tech Innovation.

[blogevelyg]

Lesson 6: Self-organization & Cooperative Behavior

In this lesson we learned about how certain organisms know how to work together to perform certain tasks. In nature, we see that organisms work as a team according to certain principles including:

Self-organization

Diversity of information

Indirect collaboration

Adaptive mimicking 

An example in which we see this behavior displayed is in the Honey bees. The queen and about half the colony go out looking for a new home. They first cluster together, then hundreds of scouts go to check out the area. These scouts do not have anyone guiding them or telling them what to do. Once a scout has found a place they will return and do a dance that will tell the others what direction and the quality of the location. Others scouts will check it out and if they agree they will then do a similar dance. This complex decision is done by using a diversity of knowledge.