Are ants intelligent?

Ants are considered intelligent in terms of collective intelligence and problem-solving as a colony, though individual ants have relatively simple nervous systems with about 250,000 neurons compared to 86 billion in humans, so their intelligence is very different from human intelligence. Individually, an ant shows basic learning, memory of routes, and ability to navigate using landmarks, sun position, and pheromone trails, with odorous house ants able to remember food locations and return to them. However, the remarkable intelligence emerges from the colony as a superorganism, where thousands of workers cooperate without central control to solve complex problems, such as finding the shortest path to food through pheromone reinforcement, building intricate tunnel networks that optimize ventilation and traffic flow, farming fungi in leafcutter ants, herding aphids for honeydew, and conducting organized raids in army ants. Studies show ant colonies can solve optimization problems, adapt to changing conditions, and allocate labor efficiently, with some species even using tools, like carrying water with debris. Researchers study ant algorithms for computer science and robotics because their decentralized decision-making is highly efficient. While individual ants are not intelligent like mammals and cannot reason or plan abstractly, their collective behavior demonstrates swarm intelligence that is considered highly intelligent for insects and has inspired human engineering. So ants are intelligent collectively rather than individually, showing that intelligence can emerge from simple interactions among many individuals working together.