Noise improves collective decision-making by ants in dynamic environments

Recruitment via pheromone trails by ants is arguably one of the best-studied examples of self-organization in animal societies. Yet it is still unclear if and how trail recruitment allows a colony to adapt to changes in its foraging environment. We study foraging decisions by colonies of the ant Phe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences Biological sciences, 2009-12, Vol.276 (1677), p.4353-4361
Main Authors: Dussutour, A., Beekman, M., Nicolis, S. C., Meyer, B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
Animal biology
Animal feeding behavior
Animals
Ants
Ants - physiology
Appetitive Behavior - physiology
Biologi
Biology
Cognitive Sciences
Decentralized Decision-Making
Decision Making - physiology
Foraging
Formicidae
Insect behavior
Insect colonies
Invertebrate Zoology
Life Sciences
Mass Recruitment
Modeling
Models, Theoretical
NATURAL SCIENCES
NATURVETENSKAP
Neurons and Cognition
Nonlinear Sciences
Pheidole megacephala
Pheromone Trails
Pheromones
Social Behavior
Social insects
Stochastic models
Stochastic Processes
Trails
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Summary:Recruitment via pheromone trails by ants is arguably one of the best-studied examples of self-organization in animal societies. Yet it is still unclear if and how trail recruitment allows a colony to adapt to changes in its foraging environment. We study foraging decisions by colonies of the ant Pheidole megacephala under dynamic conditions. Our experiments show that P. megacephala, unlike many other mass recruiting species, can make a collective decision for the better of two food sources even when the environment changes dynamically. We developed a stochastic differential equation model that explains our data qualitatively and quantitatively. Analysing this model reveals that both deterministic and stochastic effects (noise) work together to allow colonies to efficiently track changes in the environment. Our study thus suggests that a certain level of noise is not a disturbance in self-organized decision-making but rather serves an important functional role.
ISSN:0962-8452
1471-2954
1471-2954
1471-2945
DOI:10.1098/rspb.2009.1235