This paper reports the results of a study of a specific type of concurrency in the ant colony system (ACS) algorithm. Studies of cellular automata (CA) have shown that the update mechanism used can have a dramatic influence on the dynamics of the CA. ACS is usually implemented with a sequential update mechanism. A new method for controlling the concurrency in a nature-inspired algorithm is introduced. Comprehensive tests on a wide range of problem instances are reported. The study found that concurrency levels had no statistically significant effect on ACS performance. This result is interesting because it contradicts what has been observed in another form of nature-inspired algorithm, namely CAs.