-- This paper presents an artificial ant-colony approach to distributed sensor wakeup control in wireless sensor networks (WSN) to accomplish the joint task of surveillance and target tracking. Each sensor node is modeled as an ant and the problem of target detection is modeled as the food locating by ants. Once the food is found, the ant will release pheromone. The communication, invalidation, and fusion of target information are modeled as the processes of pheromone diffusion, loss and accumulation. Since the accumulated pheromone can measure the existence of a target, it is used to determine the probability of ant searching activity in the next round. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first biologically-inspired sensor wakeup control method in WSN. Such a biologically-inspired method has multiple desirable advantages. First, it is distributive and does not require a centralized control or cluster leaders. Therefore, it is free of the problems caused by leader failures and ca...