Complexity of environment and parsimony of decision rules in insect societies

This paper shows how colonies of social insects process information and solve problems in a complex environment, while keeping some parsimony at the level of the individuals' decision rules. Two studies on ant foraging reveal the diversity of adaptive colony-level patterns that can be generated through self-organization, based on the same individual-level recruitment rules. Regarding prey scavenging, the "ability to retrieve the prey" rule accounts for changes in foraging patterns, with increasing prey size, that show all stages intermediate between an individual and a mass exploitation of food resources. Regarding liquid food foraging, the "ability to ingest a desired volume" rule enables a colony to adjust the number of tending ants to the honeydew production of aphids. In both cases, decision rules are based on intelligent criteria that intrinsically integrate information on multiple variables that are relevant to the ants. Furthermore, the environment can contribute directly to the emergence of collective patterns, independently of any individual behavioral changes. Each environmental factor, including abiotic ones, that alters the dynamics of information transfer in group-living animals should be reconsidered not simply as a constraint but also as a part of the decision-making process and as a agent that shapes the collective pattern.