Unraveling the Secrets of Social Insects: Baruch Professor Explores Evolution and Behavior

April 9, 2025

While many see insects as mere pests, to Assistant Professor Sarah Bengston, they are a gateway to understanding the intricate dynamics of behavior, evolution, and ecology.

At Baruch College, Dr. Bengston is often found in her lab mentoring students or out in the field closely observing ants—one of the world’s most enduring social insects, with a history dating back 140 to 168 million years. Despite their ancient lineage, Bengston continues to uncover new insights into their complex world that have real-life applications, including how ant behavior is being used in artificial intelligence and multi-robot systems.

With a decade of academic research spanning forests and fields across the country, Bengston has been examining ant behavior to understand their group dynamics, ecological strategies, and evolutionary outcomes. Her findings are shedding light into how environmental factors influence collective behaviors, such as the development of colony personalities and the impacts of competition within and between colony social dynamics.  Amid the growing challenges of climate change, she is deepening the understanding of the adaptive strategies that enable ants to survive and thrive in diverse environments around the globe.

Bengston, who teaches in the Department of Natural Sciences at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, has received several teaching and scholarship awards but she is most proud of winning the Walter Clyde Allee Award to the best PhD Candidate Presentation at the Animal Behavior Society annual conference in 2015. Her research has been featured on PBS’ Nova and BBC News, and she recently presented her findings at Baruch’s Conference on Climate Research, Teaching, and Collaboration held on March 6.

We asked Professor Sarah Bengston five questions to learn more:

What got you interested in this research area?

I’ve always been fascinated by animals and eager to learn more about them. Growing up in a small town, the only career path involving animals that was commonly presented to us was veterinary medicine, so I initially set my sights on becoming a vet. However, during my undergraduate studies (University of Tennessee), I had the opportunity to gain research experience in the lab of Dr. Susan Riechert, a leading behavioral ecologist who uses spiders as a model for studying behavior.

I quickly discovered that I loved the scientific process – and didn’t have a fear of spiders. I decided to shift my career path and pursue a PhD in Dr. Riechert’s lab. I became particularly interested in the evolution of social behavior, first working with social spiders and then transitioning to the ultimate model for studying social systems—ants!

What have you learned working in this field?

What continues to surprise me is how important the details are. Variation that is often ignored, aspects of the environment that are overlooked and interactions or periods of inactivity that have been considered unimportant repeatedly turn out to be of significant importance, often to the point that it changes how we think about an entire system. Just recently, we discovered a new instance of social parasitism in ants that has been overlooked for decades.

How does your research apply to the real world?

Since I am studying ecological and evolutionary phenomenon, I would argue that I am fundamentally studying the ‘real world.’ More practically, understanding how species change their behavior in response to the environment gives us a way to track the effects of anthropogenic change including patterns of land use, climate change and the introduction of invasive species. Ant behavior has also been used to train AI to solve optimization problems and develop swarm robotics.

How do you engage students in your research?

I have a busy lab where students work every day on both independent and collaborative projects. Currently, we are investigating why ants kidnap offspring from other colonies, how work is divided between behavioral specialists within the colony, and how the environment individuals are raised in affects their adult behavior.

In the classroom, I use social insects during labs investigating how animals communicate and navigate.

What is your current research project?

The biggest focus of my lab currently is investigating the behavioral difference between two populations of ants that we discovered. Currently, we believe we have found a rare example of an early evolutionary bifurcation, which is a powerful tool to understand how new species arise. Undergraduate students are working both in the lab and in the field to learn more about this phenomenon.

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