Prabhakar said that had this discovery been made in the 1970s, before TCP was written, harvester ants very well could have influenced the design of the Internet.
I'm not convinced ants actually know anything. Just like we don't know how our brains work despite living inside them, ants don't know why they do things.
Isn't it more like we discovered an algorithm that they know well, considering that they came up with it first?