Forest trees have evolved to live in cooperative, interdependent relationships, maintained by communication and a collective intelligence similar to an insect colony.

Spatial organization observed across social insect colonies can be considered an emergent property of a self-organized complex system.

While red harvester ant colonies achieve their global goals using a decentralized system, not all insect colonies function this way.

Social insect colonies can be viewed as a self-organized network, in which interacting elements (i.e. nodes) communicate with each other.

Later research characterized some insect colonies as instances of collective intelligence.