  Biological systems can share and collectively process information to yield
emergent effects, despite inherent noise in communication. While man-made
systems often employ intricate structural solutions to overcome noise, the
structure of many biological systems is more amorphous. It is not well
understood how communication noise may affect the computational repertoire of
such groups. To approach this question we consider the basic collective task of
rumor spreading, in which information from few knowledgeable sources must
reliably flow into the rest of the population.
  In order to study the effect of communication noise on the ability of groups
that lack stable structures to efficiently solve this task, we consider a noisy
version of the uniform PULL model. We prove a lower bound which implies that,
in the presence of even moderate levels of noise that affect all facets of the
communication, no scheme can significantly outperform the trivial one in which
agents have to wait until directly interacting with the sources. Our results
thus show an exponential separation between the uniform PUSH and PULL
communication models in the presence of noise. Such separation may be
interpreted as suggesting that, in order to achieve efficient rumor spreading,
a system must exhibit either some degree of structural stability or,
alternatively, some facet of the communication which is immune to noise.
  We corroborate our theoretical findings with a new analysis of experimental
data regarding recruitment in Cataglyphis niger desert ants.
