Scientific outreach: Ant insights to promote a more sustainable organization of fishers

All species of ants – about 14,000 – live in colonies. They form complex socities of thousands of individuals where survival depends on their ability to organize. FOL PhD student Alba Aguión has worked with ant colonies during her master at the Elva Robinson´s lab (University of York, UK). Now, focused on the study of sustainable practices for the barnacle fishery, Alba has studied the different ways in which barnacle harvesters are organized across Europe – work under preparation presented at the International Small-scale Fisheries Congress last October. Taking into account Alba´s  background, an interesting question may pop in your mind: What can we can learn from ants to improve the managemet of natural resources?

Alba will deliver a talk at MUNCYT science and techonology museum in A Coruna (Spain) this tuesday to answer this question. The talk targets the general public and will cover topics such as the latest research on ants organization, how does it differ from what we see in the movies and their differences with how human systems are organized. Good news is that there are insights we can learn from these tiny creatures to promote the sustaible extraction of natural resources!

You can find more about the event in this link (in spanish)