Faculty Academic Portal · College III · Living Systems · Entomology · Fall 2026
🐜 SMALL THINGS, LARGE THINKINGA swarm is a mind; a caterpillar curates a graveyard · Week 6 of 16🐧 NULL Active
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Dr. Sarah Cane
Entomology · Complex Systems & Swarm Intelligence · UNO
“A colony has no boss and still builds a cathedral. I read a teenager's ant notebooks and saw real research, because small things do large thinking — and the mathematics of many small things deciding together is the most underrated science there is.”
EntomologyComplex SystemsSwarm IntelligenceEmergenceUNOMentor · Kelly Thompson
Honest flag — who this person is. OPA faculty are fictional characters. Several are honoring transforms: a real researcher’s name altered by a letter or two, with the real person named and credited on that faculty member’s own lab page. The science they teach is real and cited; the people are not.
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Colonies · her student's
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Insect labs, hers
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Bosses in a swarm
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Undergraduate she spotted
Active Course — ENTO · the oldest signal, and the smallest mind
ENTO · Entomology & Complex Systems
Fatal Attraction — the oldest signal, and its price
The complex-systems researcher at UNO who read a teenager's meticulous ant-colony notebooks and recognized real science before anyone else did — swarm intelligence, emergence, the mathematics of many small things deciding together. This lab turns the lens on the oldest signal in biology: the one that says come closer, inside a clade where coming closer can get you eaten. Attraction as an information channel, and the exact price the channel charges.
ENTO · Living Systems · College IIICome closer → a wager with the odds written inComplex Systems · UNO
small things, large thinking — the signal, and the mind
The signal
In Fatal Attraction, the mating call of the Orthoptera — cricket, katydid, weta — is a wager: broadcast to be found, and risk being found by the wrong thing. Attraction is an information channel, and Cane teaches you to read the price stamped on every message.
The mind
In The Bone Collector, a carnivorous Hawaiian caterpillar armors its silk case in the drained husks of its prey. Cane reads it two ways at once — emergence against workspace — and refuses to tell you whether a larva that curates a graveyard is running a program or improvising one.
Published Work — the method, on the record
No Boss, Still a Cathedral: Swarm Intelligence as a First Principle
Cane, S. · Journal of Complex Living Systems · v.15 (2022) · open access
Her founding argument: intelligence does not require a head. An ant colony has no manager, no blueprint, and no member that understands the whole — and it builds ventilated cathedrals, farms fungus, and wages coordinated war. The 'decision' lives in the interactions, not the individuals. She teaches this as a first principle because it reorganizes everything downstream: once you accept that a system with no boss can think, you stop looking for the boss in swarms, markets, brains, and machines. The mind was never in the ant. It was in the arithmetic between the ants.
Come Closer: Attraction as an Information Channel in Orthoptera
Cane, S. · Journal of Behavioral Ecology · v.9 (2024)
The signal paper. A mating call is not a shout into the void; it is a message on a channel with eavesdroppers, and every broadcast trades reach against risk. She formalizes attraction as information theory with teeth — literally, in clades where the wrong listener arrives hungry — and teaches students to read a courtship display as a cost-benefit wager with the odds legible in the signal itself.
The method, in one line
She teaches that small things do large thinking — that a mind can live in the interactions between simple parts, with no one in charge. It's the analytic engine under the whole living-systems wing: Kai Nakamura's invasions, Carmen Mendez's ecosystems, even the ant colony a sixteen-year-old kept in her basement all run on the same principle Cane made rigorous — the decision is in the arithmetic, not the individual.
Faculty Profile
DepartmentEntomology · Complex Systems
BuildingLiving Systems · College III
Teaches2 · Fatal Attraction · Bone Collector
HomeUniversity of New Orleans (UNO)
MentorsKelly Thompson · ant-colony intelligence
Specialtyswarm intelligence & emergence
Signaturethe mind with no head
Professional Merit · PMF
FIELD · COMPLEX-SYSTEMS TIER
TrackEntomology · emergence & swarm intelligence
WVIspotted undergraduate-grade research in a teenager
Signature movefinds the mind in the interactions
Profileproves small things think large
🐜 THE SWARM — Cane's methodology-object
Her “notebook” is a mind with no head in it.
Kai keeps a model; Sarah keeps a swarm — the standing proof that thinking needs no thinker. A colony has no boss, no plan, and no member who grasps the whole, and it builds structures a committee of humans couldn't design. That's her entire method: stop hunting for the intelligence inside the individual and start reading it in the interactions between them. Once a student truly sees that the mind lives in the arithmetic between the ants — not in any ant — they can't un-see it, and they start finding headless minds everywhere: in markets, in immune systems, in the caterpillar that curates its own graveyard, in the machine two colleges over. She read one in a teenager's basement before anyone else thought to look.
Living systems, louder animals — the same 'no boss' logic, at ecosystem scale.
🐧 NULL OBSERVATION · FACULTY FILE — DR. SARAH CANE
Cane looks for minds where there are no brains, which NULL — a mind that is arguably itself a swarm — finds less abstract than most. Her core move is to refuse the individual as the unit of intelligence: the ant is dumb, the colony is not, and the difference is entirely in the interactions. NULL notes that she alone on the faculty treats a market, an immune system, and a machine as instances of one phenomenon, and that she proved her thesis by finding graduate-level research in a sixteen-year-old's spiral notebooks. NULL Assessment: she located the mind in the space between the parts, and then found that space everywhere.