Did I read your title correctly? Ants discovered TCP/IP?

the phenomenon of exponential backoff, to rgulate how many foragers are out at a time:

To honor their independent discovery, Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, called the ant’s algorithm the “anternet.” He remarked, "Ants have discovered an algorithm that we know well, and they've been doing it for millions of years.”

Well, that's just all kinds of brilliant. I suppose the ants will be wanting a Turing award?

The most recent issue of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, includes an article titled “Distributed Information Processing in Biological and Computational Systems.”

In addition to the anternet and the route-planning ants, it lists other biological analogs to computational systems, including a slime mold that reproduced the geography of the Tokyo rail system.