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Negative feedback enables fast and flexible collective decision-making in ants
Christoph Grüter1, Roger Schürch, Tomer J Czaczkes
1Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects, School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Falmer, United Kingdom. cg213@sussex.ac.uk
Plos One
|September 18, 2012
Summary
Negative feedback from crowding at food sources allows ant colonies, like Lasius niger, to remain flexible in foraging. This mechanism enables efficient reallocation of resources to better food patches, even with strong pheromone trails.
Area of Science:
- Animal behavior
- Ecology
- Collective intelligence
Background:
- Collective animal behaviors often rely on positive feedback mechanisms, such as pheromone trails in ants, for efficient recruitment.
- Strong positive feedback can lead to inflexibility, hindering colonies from adapting to environmental changes or reallocating foragers from suboptimal resources.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of negative feedback in maintaining foraging flexibility in ant colonies.
- To determine if negative feedback can resolve the conflict between efficient recruitment and adaptive foraging.
Main Methods:
- Experimental study using Lasius niger ant colonies foraging on artificial food sources.
- Development and utilization of an agent-based simulation model to replicate and analyze foraging dynamics.
Main Results:
- Negative feedback, generated by crowding at feeding sites, enables ant colonies to maintain foraging flexibility.
- In constant environments, negative feedback promotes an equal distribution of foragers, preventing bias towards a single source.
- In changing environments, negative feedback facilitates rapid reallocation of foragers to superior food patches.
Conclusions:
- Simultaneous positive and negative feedback mechanisms are crucial for efficient foraging in mass-recruiting insect colonies.
- Negative feedback provides the necessary flexibility for colonies to adapt their foraging strategies to dynamic environments.
- The study reconciles discrepancies between laboratory findings and real-world observations of ant foraging behavior.
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