A dense heterarchy is a

hierarchical organization A hierarchical organization or hierarchical organisation (see spelling differences) is an organizational structure where every entity in the organization, except one, is subordinate to a single other entity. This arrangement is a form of a hierar ...

social insect Eusociality (from Greek εὖ ''eu'' "good" and social), the highest level of organization of sociality, is defined by the following characteristics: cooperative brood care (including care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generat ...

colonies in which the higher levels affect the lower levels and lower levels eventually influence the higher levels. Individual

ants Ants are Eusociality, eusocial insects of the Family (biology), family Formicidae and, along with the related wasps and bees, belong to the Taxonomy (biology), order Hymenoptera. Ants evolved from Vespoidea, vespoid wasp ancestors in the Creta ...

within the colony network are likely to have many connections with one another – making the network denser and non-hierarchical. Because there is no highest level within a heterarchy but the heterarchy itself, control is decentralized (not controlled by the queen). Communication between individuals in a dense heterarchy occurs directly between individuals and through

stigmergy Stigmergy ( ) is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the sam ...

. Feedback loops of communication can produce

emergent properties In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. Emergence ...

not obvious when only examining singular activities or communication.S. Camazine, J.L. Deneubourg, N.R. Franks, J. Sneyd, G.Theraulaz, E. Bonabeau. Self-Organization in Biological Systems. Princeton University Press. 2001.

References

Sociobiology Superorganisms Emergence {{insect-stub