Journal ArticleDOI
Modulation of trail laying in the ant Lasius niger (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) and its role in the collective selection of a food source
TLDR
Simulations of this model showed that the observed modulation of trail laying with respect to food source quality is sufficient in itself to account for the systematic selection of the richer source seen in the experiments.Abstract:
Foragers of the ant Lasius nigerexploiting a 1 Msugar source were found to lay 43 %more trail marks than those exploiting a 0.05 or a 0.1 Msource. The trail laying per forager decreased during the course of individual recruitment episodes, and the mean lifetime of the trail pheromone was estimated to be 47 min. A mathematical function describing the probability that a forager chooses one of two paths in relation to the amount of trail pheromone on them closely fitted experimental data. These results were incorporated into a model describing the recruitment dynamics of L. niger.Simulations of this model showed that the observed modulation of trail laying with respect to food source quality is sufficient in itself to account for the systematic selection of the richer source seen in the experiments.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Collective decisions in ants when foraging under crowded conditions
Audrey Dussutour,Audrey Dussutour,Stamatios C. Nicolis,Jean-Louis Deneubourg,Vincent Fourcassié +4 more
TL;DR: The results demonstrate that any environmental constraint that alters the dynamics of trail recruitment can lead to the emergence of adaptive foraging decisions without any explicit coding of information by the foragers at the individual level.
Journal ArticleDOI
Path selection and foraging efficiency in Argentine ant transport networks
TL;DR: It is shown that an individual’s preference for the least deviating path will be amplified via the ants’ mass recruitment mechanism thus explaining the difference found between polarized and non-polarized networks.
Journal ArticleDOI
Recruitment Strategies and Colony Size in Ants
TL;DR: It is predicted that ant colonies of a certain size should use only one recruitment method (and always the same one) rather than a mix of two or more, and the importance of the organization of recruitment and how it is affected by colony size is highlighted.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ant defence system: A mechanism organizing individual responses into efficient collective behavior
Hiroshi Sakata,Noboru Katayama +1 more
TL;DR: The defence system of Lasius niger ant colonies is well organized in a context-dependent way and consists of a recruiting system that allocates more workers to more valuable resources, individual ants following a simple decision rule to become more aggressive in response to increased numbers of nest-mates nearby, and variability in individual responses causing a gradual change in the proportion of fighting ants responding to a threat.
Journal ArticleDOI
Optimality of collective choices: a stochastic approach.
TL;DR: The results not only confirm that selection is the result of a trail modulation according to food quality but also show the existence of an optimal quantity of laid pheromone for which the selection of a source is at the maximum, whatever the difference between the two sources might be.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The self-organizing exploratory pattern of the argentine ant
TL;DR: A minimal model shows how the exploratory pattern may be generated by the individual workers' simple trail-laying and -following behavior, illustrating how complex collective structures in insect colonies may be based on self-organization.
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Collective decision-making in honey bees: how colonies choose among nectar sources
TL;DR: It is suggested that honey bee colonies possess decentralized decision-making because it combines effectiveness with simplicity of communication and computation within a colony.
Journal ArticleDOI
Trails and U-turns in the Selection of a Path by the Ant Lasius niger
TL;DR: The selection of the path is shown to be a collective process whereby trail laying and following amplifies small initial differences in the traffic on each path caused by these three mechanisms, and the foragers show no significant tendency to follow the path they used previously.
Journal ArticleDOI
Collective decision making through food recruitment
TL;DR: A series of experiments shows how the andLasius niger uses its trail recruitment system to select between two food sources, simultaneously presented with to 1M sucrose solution and when offered a 1M solution together with a 0.1M solution.
Journal ArticleDOI
A model of collective nectar source selection by honey bees : self-organization through simple rules
Scott Camazine,James Sneyd +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a model that describes the honey bee colony's decision-making process, which consists of a system of non-linear differential equations describing the activity of the foraging bees.